Monday, November 16, 2009

Happy Days - Fusion and Shrink Disk

Happy days? Why you ask. Well ditching your Windows laptop and moving to a Macbook Pro with Fusion is happy days!

My kids have had a MacBook for a year and I knew I need to get my own permanent machine when the kids started complaining because I was using it so much. I once took it away to a conference along with my work laptop so I could use the applications I needed.

Yet I could not pull this off without Fusion. The day I got my new piece of Apple bliss I loaded VMware Fusion (upgrading to 3 from my older 2 on the kids machine). It was easy to run through the http://www.vmware.com/go/pc2mac/ conversion process for my PC by just plugging an Ethernet cable between the two machines. It does not need to be a cross over cable as the Mac Ethernet port is smart enough to figure it out. Goes nice and fast through the 1Gb ports.

Once migrated the windows activate process caused no problems. Lots of applications that were no longer needed were removed. I also moved most of the working files into the Mac directory tree by using the neat shared folders feature of Fusion.

Now here is my first tip, my VM disk was taking 65Gb of space, yet once I had completed all the cleanup and removals there was only 18Gb of data in the machine, thats a lot of space to reclaim. Well in VMware Tools there is a nice little feature called Shink, its lets you reclaim all the free space within the VM. Here is the dialog.


It only took a short time to "prepare" the process, Fusion then suspended the machine and did its works. Result 64Gb down to 18Gb.

As I continue to push Fusion hard in the world of Bring Your Own Desktop (BYOD) I will let you know the tips and tricks to ditch that PC you hate and get the best of both world, a MacBook and a sweet Fusion based corporate SOE virtual machine.

Rodos
at 11/16/2009 09:37:00 PM
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1 comments:

  1. Welcome to the club! :-) I'm happy to let anyone else use whatever they want but I am more productive on Mac OS than anything else to be honest.

    This is totally unsolicited but here's my software list I give to technical people who are switching.... (just Google for each product....should be easy to find....add "Mac" to the search if not)

    ~~~~~~~~~

    -Netnewswire - free - excellent RSS reader/weblog publisher
    -Adium - free - better than iChat in lots of ways with the sole exception of video/audio chat
    -TextWrangler - free - excellent text editor....set it as your default. Smultron is also free but I prefer TextWrangler
    -Transmission - excellent - BitTorrent client for your legit BitTorrent stuff
    -Mail - free - the builtin OS X Mail client is really quite good...now with Exchang support
    -Transmit - shareware (but worth it) - probably the best file transfer client on Mac (SCP, SFTP, FTP, S3) - CyberDuck now has some of this and is free but Transmit is frankly better
    -iWork 08 - paid but 30 day trial - better for most purposes than MS Office and faster/lighter too (maybe not for corporate use with macros and whatnot)
    -SmartReporter - free - nice SMART status monitor
    -Menumeters - free - good little app for bandwidth, cpu, disk and memory monitoring
    -Memory - max to 4 GB or 6 GB if you can
    -Perian - free - lets you place lots of video codecs inside QuickTime
    -Flip4Mac - free - lets you play M$ specific codecs inside quicktime
    -Unplugged - free - handy power notifications
    -Camino - free - nice native Mac browser based on Mozilla engine (my default browser....I use Safari next and then Firefox).
    -Growl - free - good systemwide notifications (Adium integrates with it very nicely)
    -QuickSilver - free - a must-have for application launching and much much more (even if you don't explore this much now, make sure to come back to it....is a major productivity booster)
    -MenuCalendarClock iCal - free (if disable extra features) - turn off the builtin menu clock and use this for a nice calendar dropdown
    -Shimo - free - dunno if you use Cisco VPN but if you do this is excellent
    -VMware Fusion - paid with free demo (but can get for $40 if you look) - Windows OS + apps....need I say more? (more stable than Parallels and more polished than VirtualBox)
    -Tinkertool - free - lets you tinker with lots of hidden settings (that you'd have to adjust using the Terminal otherwise)
    -Handbrake + MetaX - free - lets you rip and label your DVD's nicely for playback on your computer or iPod
    -SmartSleep (if using a laptop) - lets you toggle the sleep modes (worth doing so you can wake from sleep immediately unless the battery is low)
    -ie4osx - http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/ nice way to run IE 6 on your machine (Intel only) for sites that require it (how I run PE most of the time)-
    -msgfiler - nice way to file messages in mail using the keyboard
    -Dockstar - gives multiple mail notification badges

    That's the stuff I use every day.....there's a lot more out there though.
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