I’ve been doing a lot with virtual machines this week.

Virtual machines are basically computers within a computer. That’s really the easiest way of explaining it.

The Virtual machine application I chose was VMWare workstation.

So, installing the VM was absolutely fine. you’ll basically create the VM, decide the virtual machines specifications and when you boot it, it’s like booting a normal computer. You’ll have to install an operating system and configure it. Fortunately though, installing drivers is usually a non issue as they’ll automagically be picked up from the host.

The strange things I’ve come a cross so far are as follows:

When installing Jaws, it took two reboots for the mirror driver to be installed. After this, the procedure continued as normal. Authorization etc was as you’d expect on a normal installation of Windows.

One non-accessibility odity that I’ve found is that while in the virtual machine, the power saving settings of the guest still continue to take priority. That means that the machine can suddenly go into stand by even though you have been using the guest continually. OF course, it’s not really a problem. Either go to exclusive mode in VMWare or change your power settings.

On the first machine I installed this environment on I had huge problems getting the virtual machine to except the installation of Windows XP and then, when I finally got it working, the host couldn’t resume from stand by. I think this was as a result of something wrong with that computer though as when I recieved it first, it wouldn’t boot until I removed the keyboard and mouse. Some of the windows and reboot issues seemed like ACPI problems too so I switched the disk into a different machine with the same spec and it all worked properly.

Interestingly, I would have expected Windows and Jaws to need reactivation when I changed the disk into the alternat PC however both continued working without any changes at all.