Mike Wilks' Blog

I finally got around to doing some upgrades on my MacBook recently. Snow Leopard has been sat on my desk for a little while but I was put off by PGP Whole Disk Encryption being a known issue with it. My MacBook spends a fair amount of time in hotel rooms so I wasn’t keen to remove it. I weighed the risks of going with the Snow Leopard friendly Beta of PGP and decided to give it a go. The thing that actually put me over the edge was the new Version (3) of VMWare Fusion.

So in order here is what I did:

1. Paid for an upgrade from Fusion 2 to 3 and installed.
2. De-encrypted with PGP and uninstalled
3. Installed Snow Leopard
4. Installed PGP 10 Beta and re-encrypted

All this worked fine. I actually also bought a download delivered Windows 7 Home Premium to run under Fusion also. Windows 7 itself is pretty impressive and works well under Fusion. I probably didn’t need to shell out £80 for an OS that is secondary and only going to be used under Fusion but I like new shiny technology. I’d had an RC version which had pretty much replaced my Vista install as my windows operating system already so this was a natural progression.

So I now have a nice shiny version of OSX with the new Windows running under the new VMWare all protected by a (too) new PGP – good stuff.

I haven’t really spent too much time using Windows 7 Beta but that time I have spent has been good. My impression so far is pretty much the same as my initial reaction, it is like a cleaner, faster Vista with less clutter.

I guess it is quite an achievement that Windows 7 Beta works well on my MacBook under VMWare Fusion. The only problem I have had with this setup is when I have external screen connected. I can run Vista quite happily when I have another screen attached, either full-screen on the laptop or the external display – but not Windows 7. The Beta gets very upset when there is an external screen attached, especially when you try and change resolution or move Fusion from one screen to the other. The symptoms of this are bluescreens and frozen VMWare.
I can’t imagine I’m going to continue with Windows 7 after the Beta expires but you can never really tell. I have a Vista install that I use for anything that needs Windows and this will probably be enough. That said I have a handful of OSs running in VMWare on my MacBook including various Linuxes.