My WindowsXP Laptop is slow and awful. Yuck.
I got a new 17inch MacBook Pro this week. Great!
But, how do you save and use the Windows apps and stuff that you have been working on?
I tried VMWare Fusion, which claims to be able to make a virtual machine from my XP laptop.
So far, I have been foiled at every attempt.
First, the VMWare Fusion 4 Migration Assistant was difficult to just make it work. There is an application on each computer, and a network cable. I had to restart the process more than a dozen times, failing each time, but adjusting permissions and settings and unpluging the network and whatnot. Finally, I got far enough to discover that the Migration Assistant has a known path error related to saving something at \\ip.address\vmwareMigration0\dir\ that has no known workarounds.
OK, so I uninstalled the relevant software on the XP and tried a standalone VMWare PC Migration Agent. And after an hour it made a VirtualMachine image. And WindowsXP starts to boot on the Mac under VMWare Fusion. But now I get endless blue screens of death. Possibly but not proven to be related to some odd laptop hardware drivers. It won't even boot into safe mode.
I think that my choices now are to:
1) Go back a step, and create most of that weird network path for VMWare Fusion 4 migration assistant and see if it will create the rest on its own and make a VM image. But, I have no evidence that it will help. And even if successful, the new VM could start giving me blue screens just like the VM made from the standalone PC migration Agent.
2) Uninstall any non-windows driver on the XP laptop and try the standalone image again. Tempting. That could hose up my laptop though, and if it won't boot I will only be left with choice 3)...
3) Try a fresh XP install into a VM image on the Mac. Sigh. Installing and configuring WindowsXP for all the stuff I have been running is like a root canal.
