Release 1.1.1 - Should I Wait ?

[lugesm]

Just reading this forum, it appears that release 1.1.1 has brought a lot of unexpected results. I am not sure this is a major issue, affecting only a few people out of the large number of users, or if this is a major issue.

My inclination is just to wait for 1.1.2 in hopes that all these problems clear up. On the other hand, I think that I read that 1.1.1 clears up a lot of other problems in 1.1.

Is there a consensus ? What does VMWare recommend ?

[admin]

Two relatively common problems I've been hearing are sound and an unexpected signal 10. For some people, sound is only coming out of the internal speaker rather than the default sound device, which is mostly a problem on Mac Pros (other Macs tend to have the internal speaker the same as the default speaker). 1.1.1 attempted to work around a similar problem where some sound plugins would trigger this behavior, but it appears that the workaround sometimes causes problems. For some people, attempting to type in their guest causes the vmware-vmx process to crash with an unexpected signal 10. I'm not sure what change in 1.1.1 might be responsible. We are looking into both of these.

It's hard to judge how widespread these are, since people don't usually post about success but do usually complain about failures. As far as I know, neither of these issues has showed up in-house (or else we wouldn't have released 1.1.1, obviously). For what it's worth, I've used 1.1.1 without problems (though in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not in a position to notice the sound problem if it were present because I'm using a laptop).

[lugesm]

Thank you for your prompt reply to my inquiry. Since I am running 1.1 with no known problems ( I love this program ! ) it is probably best that I bypass 1.1.1 and wait for the next release.

Regards,

L

[rhind]

I'm not seeing any new issues with 1.1.1 but I'm on a laptop also at the moment so that may be why. Also, I don't use sound anyway (but I do use Win XP as my guest).

Cheers

Russell

[scottishwildcat]

With any software, the best advice is usually "if it's not broken, and you don't need any of the new features, don't upgrade".

[thf]

Hi...

I don't buy the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" idea, but I do think a cautious waiting period is in order.

But I think that's over now, for me anyway.

- Have a backup of your virtual machines, as you would with any program's "data files", since there can be problems induced into your data by the new version (ie, you may not be able to go back just by re-installing the previous version of Microsoft Office, VMware or whatever).

- Upgrade carefully. For example, I can't imagine upgrading VMware with any of my virtual machines "suspended", which to me equates to "up and running".

Even thought things may be ok now, they can get better via upgrade. This comment was left at Ric Ford's MacInTouch site yesterday (not by me):

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Just wanted to share an observation about the new Fusion update. Version 1.1.1 launches a WindowsXP saved state nearly instantaneously. The difference in startup times between version 1.1 and 1.1.1 is dramatic. The save and shutdown improvement is just as great. I never expected such a small change in version number to provide such a noticeable improvement.

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May not be "nearly instantaneous" for you or me, but sounds good, no?

Tom

[matthewls]

Regarding my report of "near instantaneous" resuming of and xp session in 1.1.1:that was only, it turns out, when the session was still cached by os x. Once the memory had been swapped, the startup was more usual (i.e. slower). I should have sent this correction in before so people wouldn't think I was shilling or worse. It was based on a very early and tiny sample of session restores. I was astonished, but more experience has clarified things.

So: restore is faster in 1.1.1 but far from instantaneous under most conditions.

Sorry to be misleading.

Matthew