July 31st, 2009
Installing Windows 7 Release Candidate.
I’ll be honest, I had visions of a really epic “first walkthrough” post, with multiple screenshots- maybe even a video- and detailed explanations on how to get an unsupported Preview Release Operating System going in VMware, but it was amazingly unexciting in practice.
I went and downloaded the iso and got my key, ran vmware and told it to install off of said iso. Done.
The only thing that I was remotely hesitant about was telling it what currently shipping OS to think it’s installing. In retrospect, I see that some folks online at VMware reccomend telling it it’s a Windows Server 2008 image, but I picked Vista off the list and it seemed to work just fine.
Things have come along way since the Bootcamp Beta, which required burning disks and a 28ish page pdf of instructions. You simply run the app and point to a file now. Almost a let down, it’s so anticlimatic.
Yeah, but without doing it through boot camp, you can’t boot natively into Windows. Pros and cons…
Posted by Justin on August 6th, 2009
Hey Justin- I had XP on bootcamp on my home machine, and after not booting into for a solid year I decided virtualization is right for me.
I agree, if you’re a hardcore Windows user and spend the bulk of yuor workday in that environment, going native and Bootcamping it is a sweet solution (especially considering vmware let’s you use that bootcamp install as a virtual machine). The downside is you have to partition your drive, have retail disks at the ready, etc.. My 30 second tutorial to get up and going provides an environment that’s “good enough” for alot of people, and most importatnly, is super accessible. You can go download it all and try it right now. If you don’t like it, delete it! No futzing with partitions, etc.
Posted by Rob on August 7th, 2009