The Place to Be!

3 + 1 = 4. Wait...plus 1??

Like I mentioned a while back, one of the reasons for building the Hackintosh was so that I could run a bunch of virtual machines on it and knock the rust off of some of my technical chops a bit. So, right away I slapped Server 2003, XP and Windows 7 beta on. They all worked surprisingly well, my fiance even used the XP VM every day for a couple of weeks before she got her MSI Wind. So, that’s all fine and dandy, but I was also gonna need to have a bare metal install of XP so I could get some of the more demanding games going that wouldn’t run great in a VM (I blame GelohPig..had he not got me UTIII I may have never done it!) So, I slapped another drive in the Hackintosh, installed XP and whenver I need to boot directly in to XP to get my game on I tell the BIOS to boot from that drive. Funny thing happened. The other day my girl was checking on some wedding stuff she had on the XP VM and left VMWare Fusion running when she was done. I looked at the console and was surprised to see that my 3 virtual machines had somehow become 4!! What? Take a close look at the picture above and you’ll see that VMWare Fusion found the seperate install of XP and added it to my list of VMs as a Boot Camp partition fully ready to boot! I was especially impressed with this considering I dismount the XP drive when I’m in OS X so I don’t cross any of the data up. So, of course, I had to try it out. I started the VM up and it booted right into XP without a hitch and installed VMWare Tools for me. Runs great. Only difference I can see is that you can’t suspend it like a standard VM because it has to contend with the fact that you might reboot the system directly in to XP at some point. For that reason, I’ll mostly stick with standard VMs because they resume from suspend so fast it makes it a lot more convenient to bounce in to the VM and do what you have to do and get out. But, for times that I might want to run something that’s on the physically installed version of XP and don’t want to leave OS X, this is a great option to have.

-D