So I bought a laptop.
My employer — heretofore known as the Great White Devil (as coined by Joel Watson of HijinksEnsue) or GWD for short — was giving me some after my request for a RAM upgrade to the impossibly small 512kb that I have now due to the new Encrypted status of my laptop and it’s inability to cope with said Encryption given its resources. So, I just went out and bought a laptop. Of course, GWB requires that any machine on its network be a company asset so using a personal laptop is not permitted and is enforced through the use of a managed desktop suite. Unwilling to give them access to the entire machine (since it is, after all, mine), I decided a virtual machine was the next best option.
I installed VMWare Server and, after 3 long hours of a Windows XP installation, driver installation, software installation, and laptop encryption, I had a VMWare image that mostly worked. There were, of course, a few problems.
First of all, when using VIsta (yeah, cringe) as a Host OS with VMServer or VMWare Player, the clock in the guest OS has a tendency to be inaccurate. I was showing up at meetings early and finding my days a lot shorter than they should be until I realized this little bug.
These few lines of code in C:\ProgramData\WMWare\VMWare Server\config.ini seemed to solve that problem. Of course, you’ll want to algter tje cpuKhz to reflect the actual speed of your processor.
host.cpukHz = “2000000″
host.noTSC = “TRUE”
ptsc.noTSC = “TRUE”
processor0.use = “FALSE”
processor1.use = “TRUE”
The second annoying problem is that, when starting the first VM after a reboot, Vista would hang for 3-5 minutes solid. It would hang so hard that the mouse would even stop moving. In the same config.ini file, I beleive the following lines corrected this, but switched to VMWare Player shortly there after so I can’t be sure.
host.TSC.noForceSync = “TRUE”
The final problem with VMWare Server, for which I have been unable to find a fix, is that Wireless Network cards simply will not bridge properly. I read a couple of people having the same trouble and suggesting various fixes including reconfiguing the Network Interfaces as Administrator and such. No matter what I tried, it didn’t work.
So, I switched to VMWare Player. Of course you can’t have Player and Server installed at the same time, so I had to uninstall Server first. And Player wont alter the VM settings in anyway so, if I want to change anything, I have to go back to installing Server first, which is annoying. But, aside from that Player does not have the same problems with the Wireless Network Bridge that I had with Server. It did however have the “clock too fast” issue mentioned above, so those config lines were still needed.
It’s working pretty solid now. Of course, with the crippled nature of VMWare Player, I’d really like to switch to something else. VirtualBox looks promising. I played with it a bit and rather liked it. Unfortunately, when it reads my prepared VMWare image and boots into Windows, it is unable to find a driver for the Network Interface it sees. So, while it boots just fine, without a working network adapter it’s pretty useless. I’ll play around with it some more in the future and see if I can make some more progress.