Installing Windows 7 Beta on a Mac using Parallels 4.0

So after seeing screen shots of the new Windows 7 Beta on Paul Thurrott’s site, I investigated the normal channels and found that I was able to obtain a copy of Windows 7 build 7000. Being lazy and not wanting to bother my desktop while it was encoding a video, I decided to take advantage of my recently purchased copy of Parallels Desktop 4.0 and install the Windows 7 beta on a virtual machine on my mac.

The first attempt at installation proved to be a little problematic.  Parallels detected the Windows 7 Beta disc I burned from an image file as a Windows Vista installer. I went ahead and let it believe that and created a virtual machine with a 32GB dynamic hard drive and a gigabyte of RAM. The install went exactly as expected (quicker than vista and with fewer prompts) and once the files had been installed, the machine restarted. Unfortunately, the system hung at the “Starting Windows” screen. iStat nano is showing that the processor i gave to Windows 7 is completely maxed out. I attempted to restart the machine and after about an hour of “Starting”, I decided to scrap this attempt and create a new machine with different settings.

After deleting the old virtual machine and recreating one with the windows version as “Other Windows”, 64GB of disc space and 1536 KB of RAM, I was able to install and run Windows 7 Beta using Parallels on a Mac.   The install again ran smoothly and once installed the “Starting Windows” screen lasted for about 10 seconds before moving on.  The setup process did omit the “Homegroup” setup that I was used to seeing from the previous builds of Windows 7 that I had installed.  Apparently this screen did not show up because the Networking and sound drivers aren’t automatically detected.  Once I was logged in however, I was able to install parallels tools and this found all of my missing drivers very quickly.  I was then able to manually go in and setup the homegroup.

installing windows 7 the way I did cripples the new super task bar as well.  I am unable to store links in the task bar so icons only appear there when a program is running.  I’m sure this has to do with my settings for the Virtual Machine and if not it appears that parallels is working on a solution.  However, using the task bar in this way may actually prove a better solution than Microsoft’s current implementation.  Mixing shortcuts in with icons for running programs is a significant UI change for windows and the thought of this being on by default makes the customer support side of me cringe and seriously consider changing fields for the year or two after 7 comes out.

I am reservedly excited about the rest of the possibilities that windows 7 has to offer. from what I have been able to gather, they have streamlined all aspects of the operation system. this will hopefully mean that 7 is more efficient and capable of running on lower spec’d devices. I think that the settings for my virtual machine qualify so we’ll see how it performs.  Native support for H.264 is also very exciting for me.  The M3 build of windows 7 played every media file I could throw at it out of the box! I didn’t have to install a single codec, which is something that has been almost as routine as installing windows updates when I install a new OS.  Not even the Mac could do that without installing VLC or other third party players.  For a guy with about 400 GB of TV shows, Movies and other videos in a variety of different formats, this feature will make my life a lot easier.

More to come when I have a chance to put the OS through it’s paces.

Posted by nate Posted in: computers and technology Comments (0) 2:10am December 28, 2008

winter wonderland in muskegon, michigan

heading home for the holidays was less of an adventure starting off this year that it was last year. last year, i flew from dc to detroit, only to have my flight from detroit to muskegon cancelled due to weather. at the time i had a nasty head cold and had to take bus to lansing where i stayed the night and then another bus back to muskegon the next day. i resolved to not have this happen again by taking a direct flight from dca to grand rapids. the flight was fine and on-time. i rented a car and heading to muskegon. just as i arrived, so did a rather nasty winter storm which hasn’t let up since.

below you can read the exciting note from the national weather service and view some of my pictures from around the house today. just a ridiculous amount of snow….

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Posted by nate Posted in: life and times Comments (0) 11:30pm December 21, 2008

blogo as a mac replacement for windows live writer?

i’ve been looking for a piece of software that is on the same level as windows live writer. but this would be for my new macbook which, for some reason, refuses to run windows live writer in parallels. i’ve looked around quite a bit and never found anything that was more than a text editor with some ftp functionality tacked on. blogo is interesting though. it is in beta and available from www.drinkbrainjuice.com for $25. I’m still trying to figure it out but the picture adding and editing will be pretty interesting. it allows you to control the size of the thumbnails for your images and automatically links to the full sized image. a feature that you can see clearly throughout this post.

it allows you to interface with any of several blogging services including your own hosted blog. Once I added my own site it threw a notice letting me know that I had to allow wordpress to accept publishing from remote sources. once approved, blogo had no problem connecting to my blog. it also serves as a twitter/facebook/social network client. allowing the user to update twitter and their personal blog within a single piece of software.

one of the coolest features i’ve noticed so far is the live preview that blogo provides. as you are writing a post, you can bring up a preview window that pulls the active content from your site and displays your new post within that interface. This allows you to quickly see how layout changes will be implemented and to see how many sentences you’ll have to write to fill out the rest of this blog…

this feature is probably better than windows live writer’s ability to create posts with the same formatting of your actual blog. with all of the snow that we’ve had in muskegon in the last few days… me and blogo are going to get very acquainted.

Posted by nate Posted in: computers and technology Comments (1) 6:23pm December 21, 2008

Uncharted territory – My new macbook

I have gravely neglected this site but i thought that the purchase of a new macbook might warrant an update.  my stepmom graciously offered to buy me a new laptop after the death of my old hp 14" dv2225nr.  I purchased it back in february 2007 and The hp was a good computer for the first year or so, then things started going very wrong.  First the monitor would seemingly respond only when it felt like it, then the wireless card failed.  eventually the computer stopped posting and i was left without a portable computer (hdd still responded just fine when used externally so i’m guessing it is the motherboard that finally gave in).  oh woe is me right?

i went to visit my stepmom back in september and she offered to get me a new laptop.  I was on the fence at the time as to what to do.  nothing that was out there really grabbed my attention and the fact that i don’t do alot of portable computing sealed my decision to wait a little longer.  then in october, apple refreshed their line of notebooks and they looked very compelling.  Earlier this week when speaking with her, my stepmom again reminded me of her offer and this time i took her up on the offer.  purchasing the first apple computer (and only the second apple product) i have ever owned has left my psyche confused and slightly disoriented but happy nonetheless.  more after the jump

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Posted by nate Posted in: computers and technology Comments (0) 2:49pm November 14, 2008

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