My Mac & Windows Under VMware - Awesome!

Loving the new Macbook Pro. Simply loving it. OK, there are a lot of things I really
dislike (no task bar, stupid keyboard shortcuts). I’ll get back to those later.
But someone told me that the Mac is one of the best ways to run Windows XP, and
they were totally correct. I have both a super pretty laptop now and a fast one
running all my regular apps without me having to deal with the Mac OS much or
until I want to.

The guy at the Apple store told me that
VMware was recommended by most
people for running Windows on the Mac rather than
Parallels. I trusted him and went with
it, and polls that
Vanessa and Scoble
have done seem to back him up. Add me to the converted. It’s great.

First challenge. How to get the software into the Mac. See, the Mac DVD
player is cool. Nothing slides out. You just shove the disc in. But I
wondered if it was working since the disc didn’t get "grabbed" until it was
almost entirely in. But nice — it’s a pain having the disc carriers slide out.
Ejecting was another issue. I could not figure it out. Totally lost. Eventually
using the Finder window, it clicked that the VMware listing was the name of the
disc (on the PC, I’d be looking for a drive name plus maybe the name of the
disc). I finally got it out.

Before I removed it, I did the install, of course. Install was pretty straight-forward though involved a lot of windows and
options that I didn’t know the right answer to. I just went with the defaults.

After installing it, confused Windows user took over. With Windows, any
program gets installed in your Start menu. (Personally, I also have a folder
called "Programs" on my desktop where I drag icons for programs I use, to avoid
the mess the Start menu can become). I kept looking for something that
corresponds to the Start menu on the Mac but had no luck. Where the hell was
VMware?

Eventually, I clicked on the hard drive icon on the desktop, saw the
applications folder and found it there. Then I wanted to make a shortcut to it,
but right clicking seemed to be useless for anything. And when I moved the app,
it MOVED the app, not created a shortcut. Windows people know that you never
move apps. It screws everything up. I dimly remember now this not being an issue
with Macs. But I put it back, anyway.

I right clicked again, then this time noticed the Make Alias option. Oh,
yeah, that’s what Mac calls shortcuts. So I made one, which shows up the same
folder, then moved it to the desktop. How annoying I couldn’t right-click drag
and make an alias where I wanted it.

Time to get VMware going. Launching the app, it quickly told me that I
needed to download the latest update. I did that, then ran the program. I got a
screen asking what type of virtual machine I wanted. Since I had a copy of
Windows XP Pro around, I went for that. VMware then asked for the software CD.

Problem. My version is an upgrade copy (I also have a full version but
grabbed the wrong CD). Using the upgrade version meant the Windows XP Pro setup
screen wanted to verify ownership of an old copy of Windows. On a Windows
machine, you just eject the CD, insert the old CD, it looks and you’re set. But
how to eject from the virtual machine? The Mac didn’t even know there was a CD
in it, from the Finder!

Finally, I noticed a little CD option at the bottom of the VMware window that
was running the install program. I told it to disconnect the CD. That let the
Mac realize there was a CD in it, and I could eject. I inserted the old Windows
CD that I had, got verified, then repeated the process to get going.

It was amazing to watch Windows install on my Mac, and I did a little jump
when the Windows start-up sound came out of it. Weird! I then spent an hour or
two running XP Service Pack 2 and connecting to update Windows with nearly
100 other updates. A pain, but it all went smoothly and on an automated basis.

Eventually, it was time to install Office 2007. But before I did that, I
wanted to link to my network file server. From within Windows. Which, at first
seemed impossible. I looked and looked, finally found
this,
suggesting you
can’t do it. Bummer.

All hail Twitterdom. I twittered for help, and
@stephenevans
helped me out. If your Windows machine is maximized to full screen, reduce
it and look at the bottom right corner. Find the network connection icon and
switch to bridged mode. That should do it. I think I had tried this before but
might have had firewall issues the first time. But trying again, I got my
network drive and have been happy ever since.

I’m seriously using VMware now, a lot. See, as it turns out, my desktop
crashed last week. So rather than hum along in Windows running on three screens,
it was either the Mac or  fallback to my old Toshiba (since my still new
Sony Vaio with Vista sucked so bad it had to go in for repairs).

Since the Mac is this new vast machine, I made the plunge — which is good
since I have to use it anyway for a trip next week. I got tons of my key apps
installed. Sure, I might move to Mac Office (and I’ll blog a lot more about what
I could find or not find for the Mac to correspond to my trust apps. But using
Windows was a no brainer — I know what I’m doing.

It works so well. I can’t say it enough. Right now, I’m using my widescreen
external monitor to run the Windows virtual machine. I only remember I’m using a
Mac when I forget about the stupid new keyboard shortcuts or the lack of a Del
key (more on all this later; yes, I know, fn-delete and there are remapping
tools). Down below, it’s Mac city — where I’m mainly running Firefox so far.

So I’m on the Mac but not really using the Mac side much. I’m sure I’ll get
there. I actually do want to get there. But having Windows is a great security
blanket, not to mention it’s fast and stable.

Now to figure out why my USB flash card reader wasn’t seen by either the Mac
or Windows side. And how to share a folder on a Mac like a drive? And later on,
I’ll talk multimonitoring a Macbook. Talking three monitors, none of this one
single external monitor stuff.