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striderjw
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Windows 7 Beta 1 video

I know that Windows 7 Beta 1 is not supported officially but maybe someone can point me in the right direction anyhow.

I've installed Win7B1 64bit in a Vista 64bit VM and it seems to work quite well but the SVGA driver from VMtools is rejected. Is there any way around this or should I have used a different type of VM (it won't be a big problem reinstalling Win7B1 if that's necessary). I just want to get as good a trial as I can.

I'm running Fusion 1.1.2.

TIA

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Dr_Lou
Contributor
Contributor

Striderjw:

We have been able to install Windows 7 (build 7000) 64-bit on a Vista 64-bit VM on Fusion 2.0.1 Hooray! Per settings for the VM, we do have 32-bit accelerated color working, albeit with only some strange resolution options... For example, we cannot get a 1920-pixel wide resolution, as we can under a Vista VM.

Problem at the moment is cannot get a working network - attempting 'shared' with the Mac, as worked with the Vista VM.

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striderjw
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I got Windows 7 Beta 1 working in both a Vista 64-bit VM and a Windows Server 2008 64-bit VM but the SVGA driver would not install in either. I'm running Fusion 1.1.2 because my WinXPPro VM works fine and I really don't want the problems that other people are experiencing with 2.0.1.

The lack of SVGA means that various features of the OS are not available, of course, which makes evalualtion a little difficult. I'm toying with the idea of Boot Camp because what I've seen of Win7 indicates that it should be a good release and I'd really like to do extensive testing.

I loaded an Epson TWAIN driver but that failed to work for some reason. I also had to download Firefox direct to the VM because the copy (for Windows) that I downloaded in OS X was rejected by Win7. Various anti-virus software packages have installed without any problems.

It's really a pity that VMware couldn't make a compatible SVGA driver available for 1.1.x to facilitate testing.

If Win7 proves a winner, I'll probably revert to using PCs. I've been disappointed with the quality of Apple's software (most of the recent updates have been very buggy - I've not updated OS X, iTunes, etc for a while now) and with Fusion 2.0.1. Apple's boast that 'it just works' has been rather hollow in my experience.

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Dr_Lou
Contributor
Contributor

Striderj, Let's deconstruct a bit:

I got Windows 7 Beta 1 working in both a Vista 64-bit VM and a Windows Server 2008 64-bit VM but the SVGA driver would not install in either. I'm running Fusion 1.1.2 because my WinXPPro VM works fine and I really don't want the problems that other people are experiencing with 2.0.1.

The lack of SVGA means that various features of the OS are not available...

What problems are people having? We are running the Window 7 build 7000 with no issues; have even gotten the xvga driver to load using VMWare Tools - this actually surprised me a bit but, alas... 1920x1440 resolution, hardware accelerated with the network bridged to the Mac's interface.

Can't imagine that Vista and Windows 7 are working this well in Fusion 2.0.1 and XPPro wouldn't... I think I'd encourage you to upgrade!

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Randy73
Contributor
Contributor

The driver loaded fine in Vista x64, but whenever I tried to launch a game, even minesweeper, the entire system would lock up. The problem cleared up when I replaced the VMWare SVGA driver with the standard windows VGA driver.

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