Vista Ultimate 64 Bit

[spas]

Testing vista the lazy mans way I decided to run it in vmware because its just easy and faster than installing the whole thing on for real on my machine. What are peoples experience with it? Has anybody ever used VMware or a similar application which pretends to be a computer when its actually just a peice of virtulization software. Who needs dual boot when you have virtual machines I suppose there is ram issues but still I find it impressive!

I find it useful for testing suspect files using a small 98 install on the VM machine.

Here is a screeny!

Screeny!

 

[Jiggah]

VMWare doesn't really help you test it though. The compatibility for Vista lies in the actual hardware. VMWare emulates some really old but very common components so the compatibility for Vista should be okay, but say you where to try to run the actual Vista with a Creative X-Fi or Audigy 2 card, you'll run into problems. There are also problems plaguing the video drivers for both ATI and Nvidia. The only real way to test it would be to make a separate partition.

For the strict feel for other OSes it's a good tool, but if you plan to say run games or something along those lines, the virtualization software can't emulate the 3D acceleration needed.

 

[spas]

I got the overall feel of it but you were right about driver problems but vista always lacked the audio hardware hardware abstraction layer. I am still impressed with the overall performance. Sadly it did deny me the use of areo which is a shame but I should of saw that coming.

From my experience of using it with VMware and other peoples machines I am not ready yet. Besides gears of war for the pc yes!

 

[Jiggah]

Gears is coming to XP, too. I'm sure some clever hackers will enable DX10 on XP soon enough.

 

[larvi]

VMware is ok for some stuff but personally I like to carve out a separate partition and dual boot. I got a free copy of Vista Ultimate from Microsoft's club live promo and have it running on one of my computers here at home. My oldest daughter is using it right now to play Halo 2 on since I'm too cheap to pay for a live subscription for the xbox. Drivers support wasn't that much of a problem but I don't have anything fancy in that machine, just using the onboard sound. The only trouble I'm having right now is that I can't install a driver for my printer that is connected to another XP machine on the network. Vista has a driver for the printer if I were to attach it locally so not sure why it can't install a driver for it on a network port. I haven't spent a lot of time troubleshooting it though.