As I posted before, I took my A+ 220-601 exam recently and as part of the study, I got a few books that came with CD-ROM’s. They all contained test engine software which I was looking forward to using, but of course, cos of the narrow minded people, it was Windows only. Since I don’t have Leopard yet (Jan ’08 after payday and I get an external drive to backup so I can clean install) I was encouraged by a friend to get VMWare Fusion. So I took the plunge and forked out the £45-odd quid for the software.
I downloaded the dmg file and installed the software, and put in the serial number supplied via email. And there I was, ready to install Windows. I pulled out a disc I had nearby and got to work on the dreaded install. I’ve already done this a few times with Boot Camp beta, so was more than familiar with the many many many many updates needed when you install Windows, and because they don’t do bulk updates like Mac OS gets (only their infrequent Service Packs) It took about 4 reboots, to install around about 90 updates, hotfixes, bug fixes and new software, included the fantastic(!) IE7.
So I finally got that sorted, downloaded Firefox, TweakUI, Acrobat Reader, and got them installed. Finally I was ready to actually get studying, but before that, a good nights sleep.
Well it seemed to do the trick cos I passed the exam, and now I have XP working for the future. I’m going to keep the virtual image on my laptop cos it will no doubt come in handy next time I need to tech support for my parents.
The next step for me is to set up a Ubuntu install. Its all done (off the Live/Desktop CD) and now just updating that. To make it work smoother, I need to install VMWare Tools, to allow shared folders and other business. Luckily, this website provides a great step-by-step for this as it seems a bit tricky.
So I’ll be a triple boot system soon, which is nice to have. And certainly one to impress the friends and family, and people at MMUG.
I'm a blogger, Mac guy, iPhone lover, 
Good to hear ya took the plunge. Its a great product with awesome features. You’ll have to play with Snapshots, they’re really handy for trying out new software configurations and then reverting back to a certain state. It saves both the memory and hard drive state.
Funnily enough, I bought Fusion just a couple of weeks ago as well. I need to blog about it too. Our topics seem to be strangely in sync recently.. haha
Cheers Adam. I’m enjoying it so far. Great tool. Wondering how many OS’s I could install before I ran out of disk space. XP is about 5GB so far and Ubuntu is 3GB
BTW, you put your URL in wrong!