In my “real life” I write C# applications for a living… it’s not so bad, C# is a very nice language and the Windows Forms toolkit is easy to use. I’ve been hearing some rumblings lately that .NET 1.1 isn’t going to work very well on Windows Vista, which worries me, since I’m sure I’ll have at least some clients that upgrade to it.

I’ve delayed trying Windows Vista for a long time, because I simply don’t trust installing a beta version of a Microsoft OS on my main computer and I don’t have another computer fast enough to install it. This weekend I’ve decided to install Vista into VMware so that I can see what’s new and figure out if my software is going to run on it without changes.

Unfortunately, I’m installing RC1 of Vista because it doesn’t look like RC2 is available any longer on the download page.

Let’s get started…

First we’ll need to setup a new virtual machine for Windows Vista. The latest builds of VMware have “experimental” support for Vista, which is possibly a good thing. We’ll see how well it really works.

The default for a Vista VM appears to be 16 GB. I have plenty of hard drive space, so I just went ahead with it. If you are using a FAT32 filesystem, you’ll want to split the disk into 2GB files because you can’t have files bigger than 4GB.

 I always use NAT for my virtual machines, so I don’t have to deal with giving it an IP on my network. If you want to connect to the machine from another computer, then you’ll have to use bridged networking, and you’ll be on your own on that.

 Now the important part! I’ve downloaded the ISO image of Vista off the download page, and I’m just going to mount it directly here by clicking Browse and selecting it. There’s really no point in downloading the ISO image and then burning it just so you can use it. If you do have the actual DVD, then you can skip this step.

 I have a folder called VMware that I store all my virtual machines in. You can put it wherever you want, just remember the location for the next step.

Very Important for Vista RC1: You need to navigate to your VMware virtual machine folder that you specified in the last step, and open up the .vmx file in Notepad. Add these two lines anywhere in the file, or you will sit at the loading files screen forever. That’s why they call it experimental support, I guess. Oh, and make sure you do this before you power on the virtual machine.

svga.maxHeight = 480
svga.maxWidth = 640

Now, power on the virtual machine and let’s get started… Here’s that loading files screen that you won’t get stuck at if you followed the last step:

and it’s preparing to start…

You are going to see a lot of this screen, because the install process takes sooo long. And come to think of it… why does it have to install updates at this point? That makes no sense whatsoever, it’s a new install.

Now you get to select one of many horrible pictures and choose your login name. Which lame picture do you like best?

Now you can choose a computer name, and a background that you will probably remove immediately

You, too, can help protect Windows automatically. Looks like the next button isn’t on this screen… I just clicked on the Use recommended settings icon and it sent me to the next screen

Time and date. I noticed that my mouse wouldn’t select it, so I had to use the keyboard.

Thank you, for being our guinea pig.

ahh, we can browse with control and confidence. As soon as we install Firefox, that is.

I think they captured my likeness exactly. Oh yeah, this is the login screen.

Windows Vista is finally installed in our virtual machine! It took about an hour to get to this point. Looks like the only thing on my vista is a lot of wasted time.

Now we have a very important step… installling the VMware tools so that we can stop looking at this horrible 640×480 nonsense! Go to the VM menu in VMware and choose the Install VMware Tools option. You will be presented with this screen:

Choose to run setup.exe, and then you have yet another prompt, where you’ll want to select to Allow

Now we finally get to click Next a few times:

And we are finally done…

Choose restart now, and watch as we get our first Blue Screen of Death:

It turns out that Vista RC1 has some bug with the USB driver that blows everything up every time you shut down. Now the next time you start it up, you’ll get this message:

At this point, power off your virtual machine. We need to go back into the .vmx file and remove the two lines that we added about an hour ago. If we don’t remove those lines then we will be stuck in 640×480 mode, which isn’t so fun. Since we’ve installed the proper graphics driver, we shouldn’t have a problem.

Once we login(above) we’ll be presented with the desktop

So there we go, well over an hour later, I’ve finally got Vista installed in a virtual machine.

Now to install Firefox…