When Virtual Machines Go Apeshit
When I nuked and paved the laptop, I cleaned up the virtual machine stable I had been hauling around for some time.
About two years ago I switched from Parallels (which had been working relatively well for me and was, for a while, the only option for the Mac) and went back to VMware (so that I could run VMs elsewhere if I needed to). Parallels 5 came out recently, and they had sent out an offer for a cheap update, so I decided to give them a try. I used their Virtual Machine Transporter to convert a Win7 beta VMware virtual machine, but Parallels ended up choking on it (it went into this loop where it wants to log the user in and out for the changes to the Shared Profile to take effect). I’m on the road, so I gave up quickly: I dislike getting beachballed into oblivion and having my laptop rendered into a hot molten pile of silicon (solid 100% CPU utilization). I uninstalled Parallels, wiped the virtual machine, installed VMware back and started the old VMware-based machine. For whatever reason, now VMware chokes on it too: the endless beachballing, CPU slaughtering… the works.
Sigh.
