After reading the comment from Ben on my 10 wishes to improve Windows experience on Mac, I upgraded my VMWare Fusion Beta 3 to Release Candidate 1 (RC 1), build 50460.
After the upgrade the things seemed to be as it was with the old Beta 3 without much difference. So, I thought of reinstalling the VMWare tools; and once I re-installed; whole thing made a big difference. Now it accepts global system keys along with Unity feature. Even though the Unity feature is not working as I expected, but coherence still has the upper hand on this. May be I did not tested the Unity with XP to compare, but Coherence with Vista is much much better.
Most importantly; it now supports the boot camp suspend and restore mechanism, which is very handy to me. I have to enable the suspend feature by changing suspend.disabled= "TRUE" to "FALSE" from the file ~/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmwarevm/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmx; and after restarting the Fusion, I can suspend and resume the Boot camp Vista OS within virtual machine.
For the whole day, I noticed three major issues after the upgrade to RC1:
- Randomly Bootcamp Vista hung twice within the Fusion, which made me to restart the guest OS .. not sure what caused this.. but I noticed the OS as if is not accepting any keys and I tried all combinations.. the host Mac OS works fine and global keys works as expected and the macbook fan keeps spinning like anything during that time…so, after closing and restarting the Fusion, the things works back… Need to find why this is happening as its not a good sign .. may be I need to enable the debug options, so that I can send the report to the team.. lets play that over weekend.
- Macbook hung in the middle of the upgrade process of VMWare tools for the first time, and after the restart the things seemed to be OK.
- Fusion freezes after the Vista boots when snapshots are enabled from Boot Camp partition.vmx, so I have to disable the snapshots and stick to suspend and restore for time being.
Looks like there is still some work from the Fusion team before they can go ahead with the actual production release, but its pretty much close to stable state and we have to appreciate the amount of features they started supporting and lately the performance and user experience is much much better and improving for every release.