I have a MacBook Pro for work, and have Windows on it in a separate partition for the occasional thing that requires it. I had to get it's logic board replaced and for various reasons it made more sense to reinstall OS X and Windows once everything was replaced and back to me. Mac OS X was easy, but Windows was a bit more of a pain because while I have several legal copies of XP, i've lost track of which license keys go with which ISOs and Microsoft wants to call me to activate things. Thankfully, this is a work computer and work as a Microsoft volume license plan so I grabbed a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional ISO and Key, and gave that a shot. First problem, the DVD wouldn't boot: it instead presented "Select CD-Rom Boot Type" and 2 options, and the keyboard was unresponsive.

After a bit of Googling around, the following is the way to get around this, assuming you have another Windows system or VM available:

1. Grab a copy of oscdimg.exe (heres one) to somewhere like C:\
2. Put the DVD you already burned into your Windows box
3. Run: oscdimg -n -m -bd:\boot\etfsboot.com d:\ c:\win7×64.iso
4. Burn this ISO to DVD
5. If Needed, use Boot Camp Assistant in Mac OS X to partition your disk for Windows
6. Boot up with this DVD (hold down C when booting, use the Boot Camp Assistant to start it up, etc) and Windows 7 will install!

Once it's up and running and you try and install the BootCamp drivers from a Snow Leopard DVD, you'll run into some more things that try and stop you. The fix for them is to manually run the 64-bit driver installer in Administrator mode. One way to do this:

1. Open up an Admin mode console by right-clicking on "Command Prompt" in start -> all programs -> accessories, and clicking "Run as administrator"
2. type in "cd d:/Drivers/Apple" to change to the Drivers/Apple folder on the DVD
3. type in "msi.exe BootCamp64.msi" to launch the 64-bit installer, and it will install and do it's thing

After those few steps and not too much time, you'll be up and running in Windows 7 on your shiny Mac laptop. Some things I've noticed:

• It's faster feeling than Windows XP
• It's prettier than Windows XP
• It feels like it wakes and sleeps faster than OS X
• Steam and Team Fortress 2 work and seem faster than Windows XP
• The Internet works.

For a class project last semester I needed more machines than I had for a demo and given that the demo was going to be on my MacBook that currently is only set up to dual boot between 10.4 and a developer seed of 10.5, it was time to research the virtualization market. Thankfully (uh..) there was only choice, Parallels Destkop. I'd never heard of Parallels and I'd been waiting around for VMware to release their x86 Mac OS X tool, but it wasn't here so Parallels it was.

I downloaded and installed Parallels, set up a few virtual machines, and all mostly went well. Except running more than one virtual machine at the same time when they are all working pretty hard. That led to nasty kernel panics and rebooting which isn't good for class project demos. Other than that I didn't have any problems and was planning on buying Parallels...

...except a few days ago VMware announced their "Fusion" beta for Mac. I've used VMware a whole lot including personal use for a few years and "real world" use at work for the past 6 months, so something from VMware was welcome. Instead of spending $80 on Parallels, I downloaded Fusion to try it out and hopefully the final product will be some form of free like most of the other low end virtualization products from VMware. So far Fusion has played fairly nicely. I'm installing Gentoo on it from an install ISO on a samba share on another machine, and it's held up well under load compiling lots of things.