Just watch out for HW virtualisation support. While all modern devices will have CPUs with this feature it can be disabled by the BIOS on Intel (on AMD it's always there). Very stupid BIOSes will always disable it without an option to turn it on. This happened to me.

If you want to be kind, turning it off is a feature to protect customers from bluepill and friends. I don't want to be kind, though...

You can test this by booting the CPU Identification CD from http://www.vmware.com/download/shared_utilities.html

Robert Bihlmeyer / ASSIST / Internet Security AG

scott28tt <communities-emailer@vmware.com> writes:


Is this another one?

My problem child is a HP Pavilion dv5. It /is/ marketed as an "entertainment
laptop", this may have something to do with it.

br,

Robert Bihlmeyer / ASSIST / Internet Security AG

Jason,

My study environment was a MacMini 2,1 1.83GHz and a MacBook 5,1 2GHz - both with 2GB RAM.

While this was bearly usable due to the lack of RAM, it did work (I passed my VCP).

I found a marked performance improvement once I upgraded to Fusion 3.

Another big issue was disk latency, so don't skimp on the drives and/ or use external storage.

One advantage of running a Windows laptop as mentioned above is the ability to run the vSphere client locally - but if you get desperate you could run Windows natively on your Mac under bootcamp.

HTH

Greg