octidextro.us

I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate almost as soon as it was available (if you haven't yet, try it out). I wanted needed it for Left 4 Dead compatibility testing the various web related projects that I work on. It ships with Internet Explorer 8 which has an IE7 rendering mode¹ (and you might know already I'm not testing IE6 anymore), so it does what I need (and plays Left 4 Dead, probably better than I do).

I had to partition my MacBook Pro's hard drive to use Boot Camp, but lost everything on the drive. I figured that would happen because every attempt to partition my drive (yes, even after defragging it, using iDefrag) would fail, though without any data loss... until I tried booting off my Leopard Install DVD and used Disk Utility. I wasn't worried as I had, minutes before, just had Apple's Time Machine back everything up.

However, with Boot Camp if I wanted to run Windows, I'd have to restart my machine². On top of that, what if the web site or app that I'm testing lives on my Mac? Enter: Parallels.

Parallels 4 can indeed boot a virtual machine off your Boot Camp partition. That is, however, it can, but not without some cajoling. I tried setting up a virtual machine using the Windows 7 (experimental) settings, but was hit with this error:

Failed to configure the Boot Camp partition's hard disk.

A disk configuration error has occurred. Make sure that you have read/write permissions for the disk.

I thought perhaps it couldn't read/write NTFS partitions, but then I realized how silly that would be. So I tried, counter intuitively, to go through the setup as if my Boot Camp partition were a different OS — in my case, Windows Vista (I figured it was close enough). Success! (or in the interwebs vernacular: WIN!)

Parallels proceeded to set up the machine, which warned me several times that the OS was not officially supported and that I would need to reactivate my OS and Office registration. I'm not worried about Office, since I don't have that, but we'll see what happens with Windows 7. I just got a pop up saying it detected a change in hardware and I should reactivate in the next 2 days if I want to keep using all of Windows 7's features. I went to check the notices, but the note to reactivate wasn't there.

Behold, Windows 7 and Mac OS X, running side by side (I have Windows 7 full screen in my a secondary display):

Sadly, Aero does not work in Parallels, but other than that, I don't seem to be missing much else. Of course, I wouldn't use this virtual machine for gaming, but it runs Internet Explorer 8, and can browse my local machine's development server and it seems to me that Windows 7 runs much better than any of my previous virtual machines. It could be that this time it has a dedicated partition... or it could be that Windows 7 is handles much better with less resources than XP, either way, I'm pleasantly surprised.

I'm using one of the wallpapers in this Aurora Borealis Wallpaper Pack and here's my Aerora.themepack, if you were so inclined.