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Macbook and Parallels

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I bought my wife a macbook for her birthday (2.2ghz, 2GB, 120GB HDD, DVD DL burner) that shes very happy with. Its already got her doing more things than Ive ever seen her even attempt to do on her old Dell.

One thing that I wanted to mention though was that I decided to install Parallels for her so that she could continue to use her Windows only software (dictionaries etc).

Parallels includes a tool for converting an existing windows installation into a virtual machine image, basically you install the tool on windows, pick a save location and let it run.

Her Dell had a 40GB drive but the parallels tool converted it into a 12GB (!!) image, which included all three of her partitions, the total conversion time was probably about 6 hours (its hard for me to say as I started it in the morning and then we went out for most of the day). After starting up the image on her MB, it chugged a little as it was installing the tools it needed for the display and device drivers etc which worked very well but it wasnt perfect, there were a couple of drivers that it couldnt identify but I just disabled these. Once done and a restart later and everything was chugging along nicely, so now she has the best of both worlds and is quite happy.

Me personally I was quite impressed at how easy the machine conversion was as in the past even with VMware this has been sometimes problematic. Now all I need to do is find the time to resolve the connection issue between our computers and set up her ipod and we're all done :)

One of the easiest "migrations" Ive ever done.

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