VM Fusion, MacBook turns Black(book) and failing hard drives!
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in MacBook, Apple on September 12, 2007 at 6:09 pm
I’ve had my MacBook, it would seem, since July! This surprised me as I didn’t think I’d had it that long.
Anyway, to recount - it’s a 2Ghz Core Duo Macbook, with 2 GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive (replacing the 120GB one that failed a fortnight after getting it from the seller on Ebay.) Looking at the Apple website, it appears there are two main faults with this model of MacBook
1 - On the first generation MacBook, the palm rest discolours. This isn’t just dirt that can be wiped off. Noooooo! It’s actual a chemical reaction between the oil in your skin, air and the plastic that the palm rest (and mouse button) is made from! The whole assembly can be placed under warranty - which ran out 1 month and 1 week before I got mine! ARGH! I may get it replaced, at the moment I try not to think about it much.
2 - The hard drive! It clicks and fails. Touch wood, the replacement hasn’t stuffed up yet! Apparently, it’s a logic board issue, though no confirmation from Apple on this, so I’m hoping and preying that it was just a dodgy hard drive. We’ll see.
Anyway, that’s not the point of this missive. The point is how fantastic VM Fusion is.
VM Fusion is virtualisation software designed to bring other OS’s to the Mac OS X platform. It’s an off shoot, I guess, of VMWare for the PC and is an absolute breeze to install and run (and didn’t cause me to have to force quit like Parallels did when it was pretending to install the tools/drivers.) Admittedly, it doesn’t give me access to the native graphics card/sound card, but for what I do, it’s fine. It doesn’t slow my machine down (much), lets me drag and drop files between OS’s and, even better, it lets me Vista it up all over the shop (just without things like the Aero effects and stuff.)
I did try Boot Camp and I liked that, except I got fed up of having to reboot to access the other OS. For those who want to know, Vista rates my Macbook as 3.0 running Boot Camp.
VM Fusion can also run the Boot Camp partition as a VM Fusion machine, however it needs the tools installed to prevent re-activation when you boot into one or the other. However, for some reason, this didn’t work for me and I ended up scotching Boot Camp in favour of VM Fusion, ho hum! I may, at some point, stick another copy of Windows Vista (actually, I may do XP instead) and Boot Camp away.
Why do I want to virtualise Windows on a MacBook when OS X is up to the job? It’s a necessity of the job really. I have to produce stuff that will work for Office users and some applications like, believe it or not, PagePlus and other bits like that. Alas, whilst I could use Microsoft Office for Mac, I don’t want to be in a position where, for some reason, a feature doesn’t work as I expect in the stuff I produce. It’s hedging my bets, I guess.
Why do I want to run Boot Camp and XP, though. I have a lot of PC games that are suddenly doing nothing!
Next thing I’ll do, probably stick an even bigger hard drive in! Oh, actually, I may even install Linux!
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