Technogeezer's Posts

It's seems it's hard to know whether the machine has Leopard or Windows focus at any given time, e.g. I'm in XP Pro in a window sitting on top of the Mac desktop, and I'm definitely focussed in Windows Explorer, so I press <F5> to refresh the listing, but get the MacBook Pro / Mac OS X <Volume Up> function. That is just confusing and downright wrong IMO. There are keyboard shortcuts that mean things to the Mac OS, (like some of the F keys) and that sometimes collides with the Windows interpretation. Fusion does have a preference that may help situations such as this. Check your Fusion Preferences (VMware Fusion > Preferences). If "Enable Mac OS Keyboard Shortcuts" is checked, then uncheck the preference, and restart both Fusion and your VM - see if the F5 key now works to refresh. (it only changes the behavior when you're focused in a Fusion windows - other Mac OS applications work as they always did). Also note that a) Leopard window borders change from light grey to dark grey when an application's window is at the front, and b) the mouse pointer changes from black (Mac OS) to white (Windows) as you move in and out of the Fusion window for your VM. Again, I'm definitely in (XP Pro SP3) Windows Explorer and I insert a USB drive. I hear the usual "bong" sound, but the drive does not appear in the directory listing. So I unplug it, wait a second and plug it in again... "bong" and drive appears. OK, so I drag a file across to C: and the file transfers probably 90% then stops. I delete the bit in C: and try another drag and drop and the whole file apparently goes across, but when I try to open it, it is corrupt. Same thing happened with another USB thumb drive and a 160GB LaCie USB disk. When one of the USB thumb drives was later put in a Windows PC it was full of 4KB files that weren't there before and ALL the original files were corrupted. This is bizarre behavior. I've never had Fusion corrupt a USB disk (hard drive or stick). Nor have I had it corrupt data when moving it to/from a USB device. As a side note, never remove a device from Windows without stopping it first - blindly removing a USB drive has the potential of corrupting the drive. I know many Windows users don't like to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" function, but it's there for a reason. In XP I want to use classic menu with small icons, but Fusion wants me to have big icons. I want to have the QuickLaunch menu visible, but Fusion wants me to have it hidden. Fusion doesn't control that behavior, Windows does. I've done these things in an XP VM, and both are persistent across logins and reboots. I don't have time to wrangle with Fusion nor work around it's foibles, I need to use XP and I need it to stay set up the way I set it. I also need to know that my files are safe and my USB devices will be detected properly first time, every time. Fusion has failed my testing. BootCamp works fine. Understand that you don't have time to "wrangle with Fusion". But your experiences are definitely not normal. Can you tell us a bit more about your setup? Of particular interest to me are: Is your VM a fresh install or is it the same one that you used for Parallels? Are you running your VM out of the Boot Camp partition (and did you remove all traces of Parallels in that partition before running it under Fusion)? What version of Fusion are you running? Are VMware Tools installed?

My ultimate goal was to run trial versions of both parallels and fusion to see which interface I liked best and which required the least system resources. I'm using an MBA (2gb, 80 hdd). I would load office 2007 directly to fusion, but I just don't want to utilize more hdd space and, perhaps more importantly, use up another office 2007 license. I'll take that course if necessary, but how ridiculous would that be? Eric (etung) is correct here - the different VMs are treated by Microsoft installation procedures, licensing, and activation as separate "hardware" even if they are virtual machines. Ridiculous - yes indeed. You aren't going to get around the disk space issue, but unfortunately you are at the mercy of Microsoft with activation.

What you're asking is the same as: I installed Office on my home PC, and now I want to run it on my laptop. Not easily done unless you have things like Citrix or other desktop virtualization tools. Or you run it remotely via Remote Desktop Connection. You can't just move the files to the other Windows machine and expect it to work.

If I've understood you correctly, you have installed the Windows version of Quickbooks into a Windows XP virtual machine you created and are running with Fusion. Basic Windows troubleshooting has to be done first. The very first thing I would try is to save that file to your Windows desktop from within QuickBooks. If that fails, it's not a Fusion problem, it's an application problem and you need to contact Intuit for help. If this works, can you copy the company file from your Windows desktop to the destination folder? If so, once again the problem lies within QuickBooks and you need to contact Intuit. Copying the file yourself may be a work-around that allows you to transport the file. If not, then we need specifics about where you're trying to save the file. Is the folder somewhere else within your Windows VM other than your home folder, on a network shared drive, on a USB flash drive or on a Fusion shared folder? From within Windows, find the folder with Windows Explorer and get it's properties. What what do the permissions look like? Also, did you check Google - there are reports of problems with saving to USB/network shares with QuickBooks. For example: http://quickbooksgroup.com/webx/forums/Working%20with%20the%20Data%20File/Back%20Up%20and%20Restore/1042

My opinion, FWIW - many of these are not Fusion specific: 1) NTFS is my preferred boot disk format, regardless of virtual or physical machine. Not only does it have better recoverability (being a journaled file sysem), but with features like ACLs it's just a much more modern file system. USB Flash or hard drives I tend to leave in FAT format if I'm swapping them between Windows and Mac OS. Mac OS X can read NTFS formatted drives, but can't write them. 2) Windows disk compression costs speed in CPU cycles. Turn it off as it's using CPU cycles that you're sharing with the host OS. At times, I've had Windows compress stale files, but only as a last resort where I couldn't expand a disk drive. And it's a lot easier to expand a virtual disk drive than a physical one. 3) Unless you have more than 2 cores in the system, 2 virtual CPUs will hurt performance. Since your MacBook Pro probably has 2 cores, use only 1 VCPU in your guest. 4) Amount of memory: Depends on what you're running in your guest and on your Mac. For best performance, you need to insure that your Mac has sufficient memory while the VM is running to avoid excessive swapping/paging of Mac applications, and your VM has enough memory configured so that it doesn't go into paging/swapping. Also note that there have been reports of Fusion having problems with virtual devices when using high settings of memory (> 2GB) in the guest. Keep the guest under 2GB. The nice thing about benchmarks is that there are so many to choose from. And none of them match what we use the computer for. I looked at the MacTech benchmarks and quite honestly I'm not impressed. There's not enough detail about test methodologies and configurations to tell that they ran a fair test. And, the comparision with the Toshiba laptop is totally worthless - comparing Apples to oranges. The fair comparision is Fusion to Parallels to BootCamp on each Mac model. Don't get wound around the axle about micro-managing benchmarks and which is "faster". Use the software that does the job you need it to, and does it reliably. I prefer Fusion simply because I interchange VMs with my work environment that uses VMware products. Parallels can't do that easily.

Yes you can get that information from the Mac. When the disk is mounted on the Mac's desktop, right click on the disk icon, and select "Get Info". The Format entry on the info page should say "Mac OS Extended" or "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) if the disk is formatted in Mac OS format. It will say something like "MS-DOS (FAT16)" or "Windows NT File System (NTFS) if it's in a windows or DOS format. But if it's readable on your Toshiba laptop, then chances are that formatting isn't your problem.

While your solution was simple (and it's good that you're working again), we couldn't tell from what you had posted that a) you had installed Windows in a BootCamp partition, and b) that your Mac was booting into Windows instead of MacOS X. To avoid the automatic booting into Windows when you have it installed with BootCamp, open the System Preferences after you've booted into MacOS, and select the Startup Disk preference panel. You can set there to boot directly into MacOS X instead of Windows. At that point, you can use Fusion to run your BootCamp Windows installation as a virtual machine. Or, if you want to directly boot into Windows, hold down the option key when restarting (as you've found) which temporarily overrides the startup disk preference.

A bridged connection should be obtaining its address from your DHCP server. I would double check the router and its DHCP configuration. It should be able to hand out a unique IP address to your guest (my Airport Extreme does this fine when my iMac running Fusion connects wirelessly). Hopefully your router is running in NAT mode, creating a unique network (usually on some 192.168 subnet) , and is configured to hand out DHCP addresses itself to that network. I would try manually configuring the IP connection (not using DHCP) on your XP guest - give it a unique IP address on the same subnet as your Mac. If you do this, does it work?

Let's see if we can work this without posting IP addresses. You can find the IP addresses in your guest by opening up a command line prompt in WIndows, and typing "ipconfig /all". That would give you the IP addresses on both configured interfaces. The easiest way to find the printer's IP address may be to have it print a configuration or test page. Don't post the address, but see if the IP address tend to match up (differ in only the last component of the address for the printer, mac and bridged network) I would expect the NAT'd interface to be different. One other question comes to mind. Let's try to find out which network allows the printer to print. If the NAT interface is disabled, does the printer still print? Same question for the bridged interface.

There should be no reason to require both a NAT and a bridged connection in your VM to access your printer and the Internet. Your network configuration is a bit unusual, and that may be the source of what's going on. Is your DSL modem just a modem or is it a combination modem/router/switch? If I'm interpreting your network configuration correctly, your setup is a DSL modem to a hub with no router in between. Usually with multiple devices and a cable/DSL modem, a combo router/switch is used instead of a hub. This provides a unique network for local traffic (keeps local network traffic local to your residence/business) as well as "firewalls" inbound traffic from the Internet. What are the IP addresses assigned to the printer, the MacBook and the VMs (both virtual intefaces)?

Most USB drives out-of-the-box come formatted as FAT32. This prevents files of more than 4GB to be stored on them. If your VM was created with the option to break the virtual disk into 2GB segments, then all you need to do is to copy the bundle containing the virtual machine to the USB drive. There's no need to create a zip file in this case. If you did not choose to break the virtual disk into 2GB segments, then reformat your USB drive to MacOS Extended format using the Mac's Disk Utility. This will allow files of greater than 4GB, and will allow you to back up either the virtual machine's bundle folder or the zip file. Note: this will destroy all files USB drive, and the drive will not be usable with WIndows systems until you reformat it in FAT32 format.

When configuring a printer in XP that is shared from the Mac , use a postscript driver (usually the generic postscript would be good for a test), not the HP driver. The Mac printing system works in Postscript, and it does the translation from PostScript to PCL.

You're assuming that Fusion itself doesn't touch modify any housekeeping information) on each chunk of the virtual disk as it operates on it. I don't know if that's an accurate assumption. All of my vmdk files for virtual disks that I've created with 2GB (max) chunks all have the same modified date. This looks to me like Time Machine would back all of them up since they've been marked as changed by the OS. Perhaps someone from the Fusion team can comment... But, not all the files are 2GB - in that case backing up multiple files would not move as much data as one large file.

Have you tried downloading the Windows HP C7280 driver from HP's support site: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software9/COL19847/mp-52292-3/100_228_PS_AIO_02_Driv_Net_enu.exe Run the executable to install the driver and set up the printer as a network printer (not USB) from the HP installer without using the Bonjour Printer Wizard.

It may be physically connected to the Mac (since you say it works under BootCamp), but what etung was saying is to check that the device is connected to the Virtual Machine. You do that through Fusion's menus: Virtual Machine > USB. USB devices can be in use by either the Mac or the VM, but not both simultaneously. Hence the need to logically "connect" the device to the VM (this process "disconnects" it from use by the Mac OS while the VM is using it).

This printer isn't a PostScript printer, is it? That's why you're getting "code" i.e. the PostScript code printed out. Remote printers on an Airport Base Station need to use the printer model's specific driver. If it's a non-PostScript printer, you need to use a non-PostScript printer driver (i.e. the HP CP1160 driver) and not the Generic PostScript driver. The Airport Base Station does not have a built-in PostScript interpreter to drive a non-PostScript printer (it does not run the CUPS printing system) - so the Windows (or Mac) host has to provide the driver to translate the print stream into the printer's native language (usually PCL for non-PostScript HP printers). Try one of the two following things: 1) Turn on printer sharing on your Mac. Use the Bonjour Printer Wizard to set up that printer within your XP VM. Configure the printer so use the PostScript driver. When you print, the print job will be created in PostScript, and then sent to the Mac's printing system, which will convert the PostScript into PCL for the HP printer and send it to the HP printer attached to the Airport station. - or - 2) Install the HP CP1160 printer driver on your XP VM (the one you would use if the printer were directly attached to a "real" XP system). Use the Bonjour Printer Wizard within your VM to configure the printer found on the Airport station. When asked, pick the HP CP1160 driver. Your print job will be converted to PCL within the XP VM, which will be sent to the HP printer attached to the Airport station.