Venu Anuganti Blog

Still am fighting to get Parallels 3.0 (build 4124 and 4128) to work on my Macbook Pro with my Windows Vista Ultimate edition which is running fine under Bootcamp along with VMware fusion beta 4. Today, I upgraded from Parallels build 4124, which used to cause blue screen of death to Parallels 4128; and the same problem(s) continues again with new upgraded release; not sure how to get Parallels to work with Bootcamp Vista. I get the new blue screen of death now. So, I booted back Vista under parallels using Safeboot with network; and uninstalled Parallel Tools. But sub-sequent boots caused the Vista not able to boot under Parallels as well as VMware; as it is keep complaining about the missing c:\windows\system32\hal.dll file at the boot screen itself.

So, I did a direct boot to Vista; and that seemed to work, which saved my life not to reinstall or repair the Vista OS…and this time I didn’t dare to boot back with Parallels ; as every time I boot; I get into new set of problems. VMware Fusion seemed to be working fine, even though I noticed that it tries to register the OS again…but at-least it looks like stable on my environment; and I think I will get settled with Fusion for now; as it has much better performance than Parallels along with it also supports Readyboost. I will wait for the upgraded version of Parallels to try later and also wait for Fusion to support Unity for Vista editions.

After updating Parallels (3.0 build 4124) and VMWare Fusion (beta 4 build 48339) to the latest version; the real fun started when I got a death of blue screen when I booted bootcamp Vista from Fusion. Initially I upgraded Fusion and booting to bootcamp vista seemed to working fine. But after I installed Parallels; then I couldn’t boot back using Fusion. Looks like the Parallels tools drivers has caused the problem. As the error is coming from prlfs.sys file and this file looks like part of Parallels. So, to get around this issue, I started the Vista in direct boot to uininstall Parallel tools; but that popped that I can only do this when running under virtual machine but nothing seemed to be right; becuase I can’t load the control panel nor get into any settings. I was able to check this by going to Explorer -> Uninstall or change a problem.

Booting with Parallels causes new blue screen of death. So ran a check disk on vista by doing a direct reboot; which recovered lot of files (especially all parallels related)…after done with check disk; rebooted with Parallels under safeboot with network and uninstalled the parallels tools and did a clean shutdown.

Now booting with Fusion worked fine. For the direct boot, windows asked me to enter the product key again before it actually started log me in…so upon doing so, could able to login to my system and everything seemed to be working now; and am not daring to start Parallels again with Bootcamp partition, but instead will stick to Fusion and Bootcamp. This recommends me that, I should be away from Parallels for time being.

Today I upgraded the following three major components on my macbook pro to have better Windows experience.

1. Bootcamp 1.3
2. VMWare fusion beta 4, build 48339
3. Parallels 3.0, build 4124

All three components had major improvements in terms of stability, features and Bootcamp vista support. First and foremost I upgraded my Bootcamp 1.2 to 1.3; and the upgrade is very smooth and no issues and nothing.

Second, I upgraded fusion and even that upgrade went very smooth without any issues. After starting the Windows vista from bootcamp using fusion; and I noticed significant improvements to overall look and feel and performance along with unity feature (which is supposed to be the parallels coherence killer); unfortunately on my install; the unity feature is disabled. Not sure it is because of Bootcamp. But will fight with it later on.

Lastly I upgraded Parallels from 3188 to build 4124; and this version did not work with my earlier key; so need to go ahead with a trial version. First time booting to bootcamp Vista took me lot of time because it tried to install Parallels tools automatically by default along with subsequent boot time is also takes long time and the display is not as good when compared with fusion or direct boot; but overall good to see the bootcamp vista support from parallels. In a side note; when I booted through direct boot; a window pops up that Parallel tools can only be ran in virtual machine, this is a lame work from Parallels team; they should have fixed this becuase thats supposed to be a basic way that people will togle between virtual machine and direct boot.

At least things seemed to be OK for time being. Currently am settled with Fusion.

Another interesting annoy bug that I noticed in Parallels. This is not one time, it happens every time. When I have the Windows Vista running in Parallels and if I keep it idle for few hours then you can’t do anything with that OS when running under Parallels. The OS will be grayed out, and will not respond to any keystrokes or mouse events. It happens either in full-screen, windows or coherence mode.

The only option left is to quit the Parallels and restart the OS back. They should let user know that the OS is in sleep mode; and should allow to start the OS directly, by identifying the underlying OS state.

I am not sure if everybody is into the same problems, but the external display to a LCD monitor from Macbook or Macbook pro is a nightmare. Whatever the way you try, either way it doesn’t have the crisp text as you see with any regular Pc laptop when you connect your laptop to external LCD display. I searched through the web to find any tweaks to make it better..but left with same issues all over without a proper solution. I tried both analog and digitial options, no way it appears better on display..

Looks like lately I started liking Ubuntu (especially 7.04, Feisty) operating system after Windows Vista, in terms of features, compatibility, ease of use and etc. Mac OS in general way behind Windows and Linux, but it has great look and feel and few misc apps; which you need to use Mac to get experienced along with Linux like emulation. But initially I thought as I am new the mac world and without knowing much I might be feeling like that. But I talked with few college going folks who has Macbook; and they too expressed the same..indeed they use Vista on mac…I still see that my Mac OS hangs most of the time, only option for me is to reboot..and at times loading of simple apps takes forever as that of Windows…and frustrating busy cursor spinning most of the time without allowing anything to be done…even on 2.16G clock speed with 2G RAM…may be time will answer when large userbase starts using Mac OS, then you will see the real comments…but will wait for Leopard.

Also, when I followed the instructions as in the macosxhints, then I cant return back to my laptop display, only option is to power it off and restart the system. This is totally annoy.

As we had earlier post that Parallels is not supporting Readyboost on its Windows Vista installation due to USB speed issues. As Boot Camp allows to take advantage of the Readyboost feature as it is a native install, if one is OK with the dual boot that is a better option as the Vista performance experience index scrore using boot camp is 4.6.

But today I thought of experiementing with Vmware fusion to see how it performs when compared to Parallels. But to my surprise, the latest version 1.0b3 (build 43733) is real kool and works by booting to Boot Camp partition ( Parallels does not yet support this for Vista) and takes advantage of Readyboost as well.

Here is the steps what I did in my Intel compatible Macbook Pro:

Install Windows Vista using regular boot camp Install all boot camp drivers and update using Windows update Insert readyboost compatible flash drive and after the test, assign the default size (mine 1.6G out of 2GB) Now reboot to Mac, download and install VMware fusion beta, which is freeely available from VMware. Once its installed, start the VMware fusion and point to pick the Boot Camp partition Configure the VMware (VMware tool bar on top -> Virtual Machine -> Settings) to have right memory (I gave 1.2G to VM and 1 Processor, and rest to default) Disable the debug logs (VMware tool bar on top -> VMware Fusion -> Preferences -> Uncheck Diagnostics) And start the OS, it just starts without any problem Don’t be panic as the OS operates slower than Parallels and it takes time to take mouse clicks and keyboard input. Windows might report missing drivers and etc; do not worry. Now, install VMware tools when the OS is running (VMware tool bar on top -> Virtual Machine -> Install VMware tools ) and once the disk is mounted run setup.exe and install all drivers. After the VMware tools are installed completely; reboot your system. After the reboot, run Windows update to have latest drivers if there are any missing and reboot if asked. Once the system rebooted back, insert your ready boost flash drive and the VMware automatically uses this as readyboost as its already configured on that OS when its in Boot Camp. To confirm whether readyboost works or not, you can open the drive contents and you can see the details like in the right side pictures Now, you can even test ReadyBoost how it works by doing this: Click on the Start button -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Reliability and Performance Monitor In the left menu click on the Performance Monitor under the Monitoring Tools category In the right pane, click on the green + sign () to add new counters. Under available counters, scroll down till you see ReadyBoost Cache and double-click on it to expand this category. Select the ReadyBoost Cache counter that you would like to add by left-clicking on it and then clicking on the Add button. Once you have added all the ReadyBoost Cache counters that you would like to monitor, press the OK button. Now you can see graph with all counters as in the picture below. Open IE browser or any other application to see how it spikes by doing multiple times

Thats all, now I have Windows Vista which can either boot using Boot Camp as natively or through Vmware Fusion and Readyboost works in both ways except that Aero theme will be missing when ran with VM and thats a well known issue in the world of virtualization.

Here is the few missing features when compared to Paralles:

• Coherence is absolutely a needed and lovable feature by everyone in Parallels, which is totally missing in VMWare
• Changing from Full-Screen to regular and regular to full-screen takes some time in VMWare; where is Parallels it is instant and animation is too cool.
• The performance in Vmware is not that optimal compared to Parallels even after installing VMware tools and disabling the debug logs. May be future releases will address this. But not really bad as it works perfect for general development use.
• Overall its good time for us and we have to wait and see who wins in the race..either VMware or Parallels …am neutral at this time.

So far I have seen only Windows blue screen of death; and lately as I started playing with white Apple Mac series, and other day suddenly encountered the death of white screen. And the message is so clear that I must restart my Macbook pro to get the things working by recycling the power, and none of the other peripherals works. Once restarted, as usual like Windows, it will pop up a windows to report the error to Apple as in the screen shots below.