Parallels, day 2

Saturday, March 31, 2007 by Dave Winer.

When I started installing XP, foolishly I thought "How cool is this, I get to use my Mac, and put the PC in a little window, even hide it if I want. And it all runs at native speeds!"  

I was happy, until I hit the first stumbling block, a dead-end, deal-stopper, brick wall. 

Joe Cicinelli says it took 10 tries to get XP to install. Gulp. 

11:53AM Pacific: Well, I got past the first hurdle, or so it seems. I didn't know you had to click in the window to get it to recognize keystrokes. Once I did that, it recognized the old Windows CD and asked me to put back in the new Home Edition CD. It continued the installation, rebooted the virtual machine, and now it's "finishing setup" with 36 minutes left to go. I did the cmd-tab thing to get back into my blog outliner, so I could write this post while it's doing its thing. The disk is whirring happily or so it seems. Here's a screen shot. Praise Murphy, I may just have Windows running here soon. Fingers crossed! 

12:05PM Pacific: It worked! Amazing. I've got Windows running on my MacBook. Exciting!! 

12:37PM Pacific: It seems my computer should be heavier now that it has a Windows machine inside it, but it feels just about the same. I have Firefox and the OPML Editor installed in the virtual environment. Next -- get a copy of WinZip.