Some reflections 17 months later...

First of all, I'm still very, very happy about being able to use my Mac every day. I've been keeping Leopard updated, so that is still running smooth as ever. Windows XP, on the other hand, has started to lag in the way characteristic for a Windows installation, despite the fact that basically all I do in Windows is use Outlook and Office. Apparently that is enough to degrade performance. I will definitely upgrade to Windows 7 when it arrives this fall. More on this in subsequent posts.

Some tips for those of you who are about to install a Mac to dual boot OS X/Windows using VMWare Fusion:

1. One mistake I made when partitioning the disk, was to allocate way too much space for the NTFS partition (80 Gb out of 250), which has led to my Mac OS X partition being just about full, while the NTFS partition is only filled about 25%.
   
   I save all files that I work with in the Mac OS X partition, by sharing my home directory in Mac OS X with XP using the "Shared folders" feature in VMWare Tools. I really like this setup, since I can write my documents in Office 2007 for Windows to ensure full compatibility with my all-PC-colleagues, and at the same time use Spotlight in Leopard for full text search (a lot faster than Desktop Search in XP) and last, but not least, use the lightning fast Preview function to preview Office and PDF documents.
   
   I see two alternative ways out of this:
   
   a) Shrink the NTFS partition to, say, 30 Gb.
   b) Remove the NTFS partition alltogether, and stop using a Boot Camp partition.
   
   I'm leaning towards b), which leads me to my next mistake.
   
   
2. I shouldn't have made a Boot Camp partition. So, why did I do it in the first place? Well, being at a new job and having no previous experience with dual booting a Mac, I really didn't want to take any risks of compatibility issues in the Windows installation. Therefore, I chose to use a Boot Camp partition, so that I could boot the machine straight into Windows, to rule out VMWare compatibility as a cause of eventual problems. After 17 months, I haven't used Boot Camp even once!
   
   In addition, when I had the system set up, I got a problem with the Windows license, since the hardware configuration is different when booting the Boot Camp partition in VMWare Fusion, compared to booting up in Boot Camp. I had to call Microsoft to beg for more chances, since I have an OEM-license of XP, that only allows for a couple of hardware configurations within a rather long time span, or it will lock me out. Since I first installed Windows on one machine, and next week moved it to a new machine, I went through a few hardware configurations.
   
   Note: I'm not sure, but there might be a chance that VMWare Fusion now has been updated to address the issue of changing hardware profiles, so this may not be an issue any more. Hang on, let me google that for you. ;-)
   
   
   
   Maybe the biggest reason for using just a virtual machine without a separate partition, is to be able to suspend Windows during Mac OS X restarts, etc. That way, I'll be able to avoid having to go through the shutdown/startup-procedure in Windows every time I want to reboot OS X.
   
   
3. All these things considered, I'm looking forward to the release of Windows 7, so that I can start migrating to a virtual machine containing that instead of my current Boot Camp partition.
   
   
4. Of course, being the Macomaniac that I am, I'm looking forward even more to the release of Snow Leopard. With Exchange support in OS X Mail, I'll probably be able to quit using Outlook altogether, and have all my mail activity in OS X instead. With an Office 2008 for Mac-license, I'll almost be able to leave Windows altogether. The only things I really need to use Windows for are the VPN-client that I use to connect to my office servers and SourceGear Vault.
   
   If I'm not able to make a colleague check in my documents on their PC :-)