I’ve used VMware Fusion for Windows before, and it’s cool, but I didn’t really have a need for it then. I decided to try the Mac version, and I’m blown away.

Upon install, it automatically detects your bootcamp installation of Windows, and asks if you want to run it as a virtual machine. Select yes, and it sets everything up automagically. Once it goes through the initial setup and installs VMware Tools, you’re set. Just open VMware and you can boot into your Bootcamp windows installation inside of OSX.

The pictures do a much better job of explaining, so here ya go.

Click the VMware icon in your top bar. BootCamp will automatically be selected, just hit “Start Up”.

You’ll get a new window and your Windows BootCamp installation will begin booting.

It boots to your Windows Desktop, just like you’re booting a physical install.

And you can open IE, go to websites (Including those that require ActiveX), run windows programs, even use the USB and Optical hardware on your Mac.

Absolutely amazing software if you’re a Mac user that occasionally needs Windows. There’s advanced settings to decide how much of the CPU and RAM you’re willing to let the Windows Virtual Machine use, etc, but I figured I would just cover the basics here, as those things will depend heavily on what you intend to do with the virtual machine, and the hardware you install it on.

I would give this 6 stars if I could, it’s easily the most useful software I’ve seen for OS X.

Buy VMware Fusion on Amazon!

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Well, to be honest, I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I finally broke down and bought the Asus External DVD drive to facilitate the install.

For the most part, I followed this install guide and used iDeneb’s ISO (Which I won’t link to, since installing OS X is technically illegal on non-apple hardware. My install was obviously just for scientific purposes and will be destroyed immediately. Yeah.), but I have a few things to add.

First, my EeePC 1000H running Asus BIOS 2204 would not allow me to install the modded bios, no matter which install method I used. I tried using Asus Update. I tried using EasyFlash. I tried using AFUDOS. Nothing would allow me to install the modded bios. I either got “Not a valid boot block” or “Too old or incompatible”. I finally stumbled across a fix when I decided to see if I could downgrade to factory bios 1902 (Select Eee Family, then EeePC, then 1000H/XP) and to my amazement it let me downgrade. After downgrading I was able to flash the modded bios with no issues.

Having worked that out, I put the iDeneb disk in the DVD drive, restarted, and tapped ESC while it was booting to get the boot menu. I picked USB DVD, hit enter, and got the bootloader. (Sorry about the quality, cell phone pic)

I followed the guide mentioned above, and in a few minutes the installer was running.

I went through the initial setup, installed the kexts provided in the guide, and had 10.5.5 running on my EeePC. But being a nerd, I had to go and fuck with it, so I downloaded the iDeneb Combo Upgrade kit for 10.5.8 and ran it. It got me up and running on 10.5.8 without any issues at all.

As it sits now, my EeePC cold boots to OS X desktop in right over a minute.

Wireless works, video works, flash works, sound works, etc. The only thing I can’t get working is the battery meter. Here’s a few more screenshots.

Very fucking cool. Playing around with OS X is making me seriously consider a mac for my next computer. Give it a shot if you have some time.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The UI is pretty clean, it’s basically the standard Google Wave interface, but it runs a lot better that trying to use the browser.

I’ve only had it a few hours, but so far I’ve noticed that it crashes in waves with lots of users. Might be an issue if Wave catches on for bigger organizations.

Also, maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get any of the attachment buttons or anything to work. Still, for the basic functionality, it’s worth $0.99, and as it’s the first release, and Wave is still is very early beta, there’s a good change that as both mature, it will get much better. I’ll update this post when and if I see an update for the app roll out.

Installation was just as simple as Vista. Format your thumbdrive using diskpart, copy the contents of the ISO to it, stick in your EeePC, reboot, and hit ESC to choose USB drive as the boot device. It should go right into Windows Setup.

Once installed, I grabbed the wifi driver from the Asus website and stuck it on a thumbdrive. I popped the thumbdrive in my Eee, and ran the setup. Once online, windows update took care of all the other drivers.

The first thing I noticed was the new taskbar. Now more like OS X’s Dock than the traditional Windows task bar. You get an icon for each running program. Mousing over the icon shows a thumbnail of each instance of that program. It’s a lot easier to understand when you see it, so here.

Of course, you can still do the Windows Key + Tab thing and scroll through all of your windows.

My impression is that it’s a bit quicker than Vista, but that could be placebo. I’m going to do a fresh Vista install soon, on a different partition of the same disk, and compare both with actual timed tests. I need to back a few things up first though, so it will be a few days.

Another big improvement is the search function. It now is most certainly faster, and offers more detail and more organized results.

The “Transparency Tab” on the side of the task bar is kinda cool too. Mouse over it and all windows go transparent so you can see your desktop. Click it and it minimizes all and takes you to the desktop.

Calculator has FINALLY been improved, including a few different views with different options and operations. Here’s the Scientific Calculator.

Taskbar now has a popup menu instead of just listing 11ty icons in the tray.

Taskbar now lets you choose which programs show up in the task bar and when. For example, you can choose to have an icon only appear when it needs attention (like a new message in a  messenger program).

I’m going to spend some more time looking around later, and like I said, I’ll do some direct comparisons between this and Vista, but I thought I’d go ahead and throw some pics and preliminarily impressions up for you to check out.