Re: VMWare player

["Paul Breeze" dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxx (Redacted sender "paul.breeze" for DMARC)]

Dear Kari

I suppose it is a matter of how you work. As to liking or not, I have
found that VMWare offers me the best performance and facilities of all
the virtual machine software I have tested.


I have used Unity in the way you suggest but did not find it to fit my
bill. On the other hand I can set up My XP virtual machine so that I
don't need to interact with it outside the virtual machine.


More generally, I am probably groping towards a future in which I run
Windows 7 64 bit as a virtual machine on top of whatever future
operating system I find myself pointing towards when Win 7 comes to the
end of its life. I am finding that while having some key applications
in a virtual machine is workable it is inconvenient; the solution seems
to be to have all, or nothing in a virtual machine. In the future I
envisage I would probably run a browser and email in the host and
everything else in the virtual machine which has no access to the
outside world. With suitable file sharing I have found it is quite
feasible to have a browser and an email client in the virtual machine
that can access emails and downloaded web pages even though they cannot
speak to the network.


Still, that is a long way down the road.

Best wishes

Paul

On 20/02/2016 17:36, Kari Eveli wrote:
Dear Paul,

I am not a big fan of VMware, but it is now the only way I can run XP,
which I need for some programs.

However if you want to use Unity to place programs in the start menu I
seem to recall that leads other problems (though I cannot now remember
what) if like me you want everything available through keyboard shortcuts.

The guest must be up and running for a particular shortcut to work from
host to guest. Otherwise, I find this very usable. For those who have
not tried Unity, the setup process is as follows:
Edit Virtual machine settings, Options tab, Unity, Applications, check
Enable applications menu. When the vm is running, but not in full
screen, there is a button next to the full screen mode that will put you
into Unity mode. Once in Unity mode, you can access the vm's start menu
(WinXP start menu in this case) by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+U and launch
guest applications from within Win7. By going to a program link's
context-menu, you can "create a shortcut on desktop" from this Win7's XP
Unity start menu. You can put it in your Win7 start menu or pick up the
command line from this shortcut to run it as batch file, etc.

 >when I am using the virtual machine for work, rather than just playing
with it, I do not really need to be able to interact with it.

In my experience, I think this is quite the opposite, having the
opportunity to control the vm is most welcome when doing real work.

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

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