Windows Vista RC1 rocks
Posted by Ronnie Holm on September 12th, 2006
I’ve been playing around with different setups of Windows Vista RC1 the last couple of days. Just getting Vista to install was an challenge in itself as RC1 refuses to install on VMWare Workstation.
It stalls at “Windows is loading files …”. Apparently the subsequent switch into graphics mode causes Vista to hang, because Vista all the sudden doesn’t properly support the emulated video hardware of VMWare.
That’s odd, because I previously installed Beta 2 on VMWare without any sign of trouble (could it be that MS wants people to try out RC1 on their free Virtual PC? By the way, VMWare Server is free too).
Luckily, Joel on Software provides a solution to the VMWare issue, by adding
svga.maxWidth = "640"
svga.maxHeight = "480"
to the configuration file for your virtual machine prior to booting the Vista DVD. It’ll force the installer to run in SVGA mode. Then when the installation is complete and you’ve installed the VMWare tools, remove the above lines and Vista shines.
My intention was to run Vista in VMWare on a secondary computer and connect to it via Remote Desktop. For some yet to be uncovered reason, however, I wasn’t able to connect from my WinXP machine. Perhaps the host OS blocked the incoming request or perhaps Vista just wasn’t properly configured.
Anyway, I decided to run Vista on the bare hardware instead, so I fired up PartitionMagic. Unfortunately some guy accidentally cut power while PartitionMagic was doing its shrink-existing-partition-to-create-space-for-an-additional-one magic. After that the existing OS chickened out and bluescreened on me, so out everything went and in Vista came.
Thus, now I utilize a two-monitor setup, running Vista on a native 2.6GHz processor with 2GB of memory on one monitor and WinXP on the other. Unfortunately, the Vista machine has a crappy video card, so no fancy, transparent UI for me (unless I find a workaround).
As a final note, I’m using Synergy to seamlessly share one mouse and keyboard between the physical machines as if it was one machine with dual head video output.
Way cool!
