I do these silly things…

…so you don’t have to.

*heh*

So, I needed to test a Vista MIG (Windows Easy Transfer) file. I sure didn’t want to overwrite any other Windows installation I had on any RWM (“real world machine”, although some would argue that excludes both Windows and Mac OSX machines *heh*) or VM. So…

Installed Vista in a “barebones” VM. Barebones? Yeh, less than a gig of memory allocated for it and just 20GB of hard drive space. Barebones indeed.

Yes, it is painfully slow and threatens to bork if I have too many things running at once, but now that I have Windows Live Mesh installed on it and its host machine, I can sync/share files between them more easily than via the VM software’s folder sharing facility (not so much a problem of the folder sharing as it is a problem with Windows Easy Transfer).

Barely.

And that, dear reader, is how I gained decent access to the 12.5GB MIG file I needed to test…

What a PITA. *heh*

At least it’s not as silly as the time I installed a WinXP VM on an Ubuntu Host… and then installed an Ubuntu VM with the WinXP VM hosting it. Now, that was silly.

But it worked.


For non-techies who’d like to give VMs a try, here’s a video tutorial for installing a VM using Oracle’s VIrtualbox (recorded before Oracle bought Sun):