Appalled at my experience so far with VMWare Fusion, Win98 and XP Pro.

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Jamie Kahn Genet - 28 Apr 2008 13:20 GMT

So I was forced to install Win98 first as I only had an XP Pro with
Service Pack 2 upgrade CD. That went ok, though performance in the Win98
VM was pretty bad which surprised me. I am on a new top-of-the-line 24"
2.8GHz iMac with 2GB RAM, after all.

Still, onwards... I tried installing VMWare's Tools in 98 just to see
how that would go (as I will have to later create a seperate 98 VM for
othr purposes). The installer failed to install the SVGA and mouse
drivers, but said it would give detailed steps to manually do so after
the installer was finished running. It ended up only giving instructions
to manually install the SVGA driver (I love it when software lies to
me). Oh well, I wasn't sticking with 98 so this would be a battle for
another day...

...on to the WinXP Pro installation. That seemed to go ok (ok, I am
getting seriously tired of these forums inserting multiple lines when I
press return!) until the little movie started playing at the end and
music started up. It was jerky, the music crackled and stopped and
started, the VM hung for seconds at a time, Fusion hung the MacOS for
seconds at a time, mouse performance in the VM was bad.

In short it was pretty godawful. I then tried shutting the VM down and
giving it a gig of RAM and 2 virtual CPUs. Performance has NOT improved

:-( Activity monitor in OSX reports very little CPU usage so clearly

that isn't the issue.

Well, I then tried installing the VMWare Tools in XP. The installer
hangs for several minutes and then tells me I don't have sufficient
privilages!?! I'm IN an Admin account in XP! :-(

I'm about ready to give up. Clearly there was no testing with this
product. How on EARTH did this get such high ratings with MacWorld and
Mac|Life? Fusion is AWFUL!!! It doesn't even work the way it says it
will.

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

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Clever Monkey - 28 Apr 2008 16:47 GMT

> So I was forced to install Win98 first as I only had an XP Pro with
> Service Pack 2 upgrade CD. That went ok, though performance in the Win98
> VM was pretty bad which surprised me. I am on a new top-of-the-line 24"
> 2.8GHz iMac with 2GB RAM, after all.

[...]

> I'm about ready to give up. Clearly there was no testing with this
> product. How on EARTH did this get such high ratings with MacWorld and
> Mac|Life? Fusion is AWFUL!!! It doesn't even work the way it says it
> will.

Yes, because your single data point represents the entire user base.

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Howard Brazee - 28 Apr 2008 17:02 GMT

>Yes, because your single data point represents the entire user base.

I've got the bumper sticker:

"Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do." Steven
Brust

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Warren Oates - 29 Apr 2008 12:30 GMT

> Yes, because your single data point represents the entire user base.

Oh holy night. Yadda yadda. Jesus loves us every one.

What about all the "data points" who just gave the f.ck up and didn't
post a message to a newsgroup?

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W. Oates

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Burt Johnson - 30 Apr 2008 09:19 GMT

I expect that installing Win98 is a pretty rare case. I have one Mac on
which I installed XP straight and it worked fine. A second installed XP
and then upgraded to Vista. Again, worked fine. I have two friends that
have installed Windows (one XP and one Vista) and neither had a problem.

This is with a combination of Bootcamp and non-BC installations. Once
set up, some sites had some issues with networks that reqiured a bit of
tweaking, but everyone got theirs working and none took more than an
hour past the raw feeding of Windoze discs.

IOW, it works for most people. My first guess is that trying to go
through Lose98 is your biggest problem.

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Howard Brazee - 30 Apr 2008 12:48 GMT

>I expect that installing Win98 is a pretty rare case. I have one Mac on
>which I installed XP straight and it worked fine. A second installed XP
>and then upgraded to Vista. Again, worked fine. I have two friends that
>have installed Windows (one XP and one Vista) and neither had a problem.

I installed W98 on my Parallels partition - because I had a full
installation disk. Of course I immediately installed an XP upgrade
over it...

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Jamie Kahn Genet - 01 May 2008 05:47 GMT

> >I expect that installing Win98 is a pretty rare case. I have one Mac on
> >which I installed XP straight and it worked fine. A second installed XP
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> installation disk. Of course I immediately installed an XP upgrade
> over it...

*sigh* I suppose I'm just unlucky... that seems to be my lot in life
since I got my Intel Mac with Leopard. I'm starting to feel really,
REALLY dumb because I can't seem to get a damn thing right lately.

I'll try installing XP in Fusion again this weekend. I've been too busy
with work the past few days to bother.

Thanks for the responses *wan looking smile*

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

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Howard Brazee - 01 May 2008 15:02 GMT

>> I installed W98 on my Parallels partition - because I had a full
>> installation disk. Of course I immediately installed an XP upgrade
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
>I'll try installing XP in Fusion again this weekend. I've been too busy
>with work the past few days to bother.

I installed 3 times with Parallels (for my wife and myself), the first
time as described above. I later learned that I didn't need to
install W98, but could just show WXP the CD. I wished I could do
that with Boot Camp.

The third time used a Parallels utility that copied my whole XP
machine over. One trouble with that is that Windows needs periodic
start-overs. Another (feature) is that some of the programs were now
recognized by OS X. I could open a document now with the Windows
program. This is a pain when I don't want to do that - but might be
useful otherwise.

I don't know how to remove one of these programs from the "open with"
dialog.

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Lewis - 02 May 2008 12:11 GMT

> Still, onwards... I tried installing VMWare's Tools in 98 just to see

Well, there's part of your problem. the VMWare Tools are drivers for
Windows XP. As drivers, they will try t install in whatever windows
version you have (the way drivers are identified hasn't changed since
95), but that doesn't meant they will work.

> I'm about ready to give up. Clearly there was no testing with this
> product.

With windows 98? Quite likely not. It runs 98, and you munged the install.

> the little movie started playing at the end and music started up. It
> was jerky, the music crackled and stopped and started, the VM hung for
> seconds at a time, Fusion hung the MacOS for seconds at a time, mouse
> performance in the VM was bad

The stupid video uses DirectX to draw to the screen. No DirectX is
going to work especially well with a virtualizer. That's just the way
it is. However, VMWare Fusion does have a setting you can enable that
vastly improves the performance of DirectX crap. (Virtual machine
Settings (cmd-e) -> System hardware -> Display -> Accelerate 3D
Graphics).

> How on EARTH did this get such high ratings with MacWorld and
> Mac|Life? Fusion is AWFUL!!! It doesn't even work the way it says it
> will.

Yes, it really does work very well. I have run it on both a Mac Book
(not pro) and a Mac Pro (not book) and been very pleased with it. It's
much better than having a separate Windows machine to deal with.

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Donad 067 - 07 May 2008 06:14 GMT

>> So I was forced to install Win98 first as I only had an XP Pro with
>> Service Pack 2 upgrade CD. That went ok, though performance in the Win98
[quoted text clipped - 32 lines]
> (not pro) and a Mac Pro (not book) and been very pleased with it. It's
> much better than having a separate Windows machine to deal with.

VMWare was 3rd thing I put in on MAC MiMI 2G RAM. It works like PC
does, actually it works better XP SP2 Home. VMWare is the way to go
for a former WIN user
Although I find Lepoard pastel borders terrlbell I like WINs
Techniclolr frames

DON 067

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / May 2008

Appalled at my experience so far with VMWare Fusion, Win98 and XP Pro.