Utter beginner sitting with two boxes and a new Imac

[patherto]

I've got a reconditioned iMac dual-core with Leopard.

I've also got the VMware box and a Vista Ultimate box.

(1) Are there any advantages to loading Boot Camp first, then VMware? Any disadvantages?

(2) I want to do some mild lifting on my Vista partition (download movies, play a few games, etc.). I understand 6Gb of disc memory allocation is the minimum for Vista. What would be a nice round number for my 250Gb hard drive?

I've been reading the forums and FAQ sites for over an hour now, and I still haven't found the answers to what seems to me to be basic, fundamental data about this setup.

Could you help? Thanks in advance!

[admin]

(1) Are there any advantages to loading Boot Camp first, then VMware? Any disadvantages?

You can install in either order, it shouldn't matter. If you're talking about activation, the recommended strategy is:

1. Install Windows under Boot Camp, choosing not to activate if possible

2. Run the Boot Camp partition using Fusion, choosing not to activate if possible

3. Install VMware Tools

4. Activate Windows in both the native and virtual environments

(2) I want to do some mild lifting on my Vista partition (download movies, play a few games, etc.). I understand 6Gb of disc memory allocation is the minimum for Vista. What would be a nice round number for my 250Gb hard drive?

If I recall correctly, I think the minimum for Vista is closer to 8 GB. It depends on what else you want to install and how big your movies are, but as a wild guess, 20-30 GB seems like a more reasonable number.

Terminology nitpick: Memory doesn't refer to disk space, it refers to RAM. There's a 8-fold difference between a Gb and a GB. The proper terminology would be something like "6 GB of disk space"

[patherto]

Thank you, and I am humbly grateful for your corrections.

patherto