My Windows Experience So Far

[gringley]

I started with an unencrypted "Windows 11 Retail" that was activated as Windows 11 Pro.  I was able to install TP 22H2 over the old one, and then update the Windows 11 guest as indicated in the guides.  I decided to leave it unencrypted so it could be a "golden master" then I did a full clone on it.  For the clone after confirming it booted OK I then did only the files needed encryption and added a TPM.  I then went back in and joined the guest to AzureAD and picked it up on my Microsoft 365 Business Premium account.  After adding Windows Hello the start menu and taskbar kind of disappeared, but rebooting from the VMware menu resolved that.  Installed Office 365 and tada I seem to now have a functional TOY.  THE TOY PERFORMS SO MUCH BETTER ON 2 CORES AND 4GB ON THE M1 THAN WINDOWS 11 DOES ON MY IMAC PRO WITH 6 CORES AND 8GB RAM (end rant.). Its really annoying!  

I do see in the Device Manager I have four unknown devices.  I have to assume these are Apple devices for which there may never be drivers?

Otherwise at least to start I seem to have a functional Windows 11 guest on ARM now.  So far so good.

[Technogeezer]

Glad the info was able to help you get it going.

I'm finding Windows 11 works pretty well too. (I splurged and gave it 4 cores). The only thing that's I really miss is the host/guest drag/drop/cut/paste, but VMware has hinted that's coming. I can work around the lack of shared folders with Windows file sharing on the Mac (and it's more reliable than the Fusion shared folders, so I'm not shedding any tears for the lack of this feature).

[ColoradoMarmot]

I was just coming to post a similar thread, so will just chime in here instead.

I build a new VM from scratch from an iso download.  Went really smooth, and the preview guide made bypassing the internet requirement easy (which is nice, because I detest forced accounts just to install it).  I see some graphics artifacts, and notice some mouse hesitation, but nothing bad, and the preview guide notes that they haven't fully optimized those paths yet.  I do miss shared folders more than drag/drop/cut/paste, but am working around it with a USB thumb drive.  

Game support is mixed, again not unexpected.  My oldest games run just fine though, which is really cool.  And I'll echo the performance - even in it's current state, it runs circles around the old intel mac.  I haven't done a stress test with it yet, but suspect I can fire up many VM's without really noticing an issue.

Only glitch as I noted in other thread, was a hard system crash when running both TP2 and Parallels at the same time.  So like the old joke when the doc says 'if it hurts, then don't do that' I just don't do that.

Net is that it's a 1000% improvement over TP1 - kudos to the team, and looking very much forward to the next drops (hopefully more frequent/smaller/iterative improvements vs big bang).