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VMWare Fusion 5 Released for Mac Users

August 25th, 2012

VMWare Fusion 5

For Mac users, one of the most popular ways to use Windows is through a virtual machine method because it allows the Mac user to control their Mac OS X operating system while another operating system runs in a separate window. It is an option separate from using Apple’s Boot Camp ability, which allows the user to partition their storage drive and install Windows. Virtual machines also support a wider range of operating systems than Boot Camp does. One popular virtual machine application for Mac users is VMWare Fusion and today, the application gets updated to version 5.0.

The update to the popular desktop virtualization tool adds compatibility with Apple’s newest operating system: OS X Mountain Lion. The latest version of VMWare Fusion 4 was capable of running on OS X Mountain Lion, however only VMWare Fusion 5 takes advantage is optimized to work on it and takes advantage of many of its new features. The update to the application also adds support for Windows 8, which Microsoft is expected to launch to the public very soon.

After you upgrade your copy of VMWare Fusion, you will also need to update the VMWare tools on your virtual machines – the application will prompt you to do this upon starting up your virtual machine automatically. In terms of appearance, it is hard to distinguish the difference between VMWare Fusion 4 and VMWare Fusion 5, so in reality, anyone upgrading will have no trouble at all figuring out the interface. Functionally, the application is just as powerful as before and is much more responsive.

According to VMWare’s Web site, VMWare Fusion 5 is 1.4x faster than VMWare Fusion 4, offers 1.45x more battery life than VMWare Fusion 4, includes better 3D graphics performance, and offers even more compatibility that allows the two operating systems to intertwine with each other in a user environment. Included in the 5.0 update for VMWare Fusion is support for Apple’s newest Mac computers such as the MacBook Pro with retina display. The application is now retina display-ready and takes advantage of the new ports introduced on the computer like USB 3.0, although a disclaimer at the bottom of the Web site states that only Windows 8 can take advantage of the USB 3.0 ports.

Current VMWare Fusion users can upgrade to VMWare Fusion 5 for $49.99. Anyone that has purchased VMWare Fusion 4 after July 25 of this year can upgrade for free. The basic version of the software will cost $49.99 and the professional version will cost $99.99. VMWare offers a free 30-day trial of the software so you can try it and see if you like it from this link.

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Are you a SkyDrive user? If yes, get 25GB of storage free!

April 24th, 2012

Microsoft has added paid storage options to its SkyDrive cloud service.

As a result, brand new SkyDrive users get 7 GB of storage for free. Existing users however, (those with accounts as of April 22) can get up to 25 GB of storage for free if they opt to do so. After that, an additional 20 GB costs $10 per year; an additional 50 GB costs $25 per year; and an additional 100 GB, $50 per year.

Microsoft has also made available for download a preview version of SkyDrive for Windows, a local version of its SkyDrive client. This is the first step Microsoft is taking toward integrating SkyDrive with Live Mesh, their synchronization service that’s similar to DropBox. The preview is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview (sorry XP!)

With the SkyDrive app for Windows, everything put in a SkyDrive folder on a Windows PC is automatically kept in sync between PCs, Macs and SkyDrive.com, according to the download site.  It also features:

  • Ability to access SkyDrive directly from Windows Explorer — photos, documents, and other files
  • Option to add new files to SkyDrive by dragging them to the SkyDrive folder
  • Ability to organize files and folders in SkyDrive, just like any other folder
  • Option to connect back to the PC if the user forgets to put something in SkyDrive

Microsoft has also made available an updated version of its SkyDrive app for Windows Phone,  a new preview of SkyDrive for Mac OS X Lion and updated the iPhone and iPad versions of SkyDrive today.

Lastly, Microsoft also is surfacing apps that are designed to work with SkyDrive on different platforms and devices.

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How to enable TRIM On Your Mac SSD to Prolong the Life Span

January 16th, 2012

I added an SSD drive to my Macbook Pro a few months ago and was amazed at the performance boost I got from it.  I had read before how an SSD truly is one of the best things you can do to truly see big performance gains but I had no idea how much until I did it.  Man, it made my already fast Macbook Pro even faster.  The boot time is amazing and opening even a bulky application like Photoshop is almost instant.

Since I didn’t order my SSD from Apple it didn’t come with the ability for OS X to enable TRIM for the drive.  And as you’ll see in the previous link, if you’re using an SSD you really need to be using TRIM.  Luckily I recently came across this article that told me everything I needed to do to use TRIM in OS X.  Thanks to the free utility Trim Enabler 2.0, it was easy and my SSD now should last a lot longer.

If you’re in the same situation as me, definitely check it out!

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Google Chrome for Mac

June 9th, 2009

You can get an early build of Google Chrome for Mac here.  Use at your own risk!

I’ll let you know if it blows up my Mac in my next post…

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Specify primary display in OSX when using multiple monitors

April 9th, 2009

When I added my 24″ LED Cinema Display to my Macbook Pro, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make the external display (the bigger one) the primary display with the dock, task bar, etc.

Once I figured it out I felt dumb because it couldn’t have been any easier.  Here’s how just in case you’ve ever run into this.

  1. Open the monitor preferences pane
  2. Click on the displays tab
  3. Click and drag the little menu bar to the display you want to be the primary

That’s it.  Something so simple had me puzzled.  Maybe I’m just still an OSX n00b…

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Ways to optimize your ASP.NET applications

February 2nd, 2009

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently optimizing our ASP.NET application to help improve performance.  After spending time analyzing the code and the database for inefficiencies, it was clear that something needed to be done to minimize the data (reduce the request size) that was being delivered to each user for each page request.

After lots of reading and testing, I ended up reducing the size of most of our page requests by as much as 95% in some instances. In the next few posts I will go over, in detail, how you can use the following steps to optimize your ASP.NET (and non-ASP.NET) web applications with only a little bit of work:

  • Enabling and configuring HTTP compression in IIS6
  • Enabling content expiration for static content (graphics, css files, JavaScript files, etc) in IIS6
  • Changing your application to store ViewState in the session rather than in each page
  • Configuring Telerik’s Radcontrols to work as efficiently as possible

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Posted in .net, mac, programming, weight loss, windows

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Windows 7 Beta – get yours now before it’s gone!

January 30th, 2009

Microsoft is offering free downloads of Windows 7′s Beta release.  You can get your copy here.  They were originally going to keep the beta open until sometime in March I think but due to the overwhelming number of people that have signed up they’re going to be ending it very soon (actually according to the site, in the next few days).

So far I’ve been very happy with it.  I am running it on my Macbook Pro with VMware Fusion 2.  Even though VMWare doesn’t officially support it yet it went on automatically when I picked Windows Server 2008 64-bit as my operating system when I setup a new VM for it.  All I had to do was put in the product key that Microsoft emailed me when I signed up for the beta and it was up and running in no time.

I only allocated 40GB of Hard Drive space to the VM and 1GB Ram (I have 4GB total).  So far it has been running great on that and seems to be much quicker than the Vista VM I had setup before.  From everything that I’ve been hearing Windows 7 is basically a cleaned up and more stable version of Vista.  So far I agree.

The next steps for me will be to install Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.  Since Windows 7 comes pre-loaded with Internet Explorer 8.  One odd/annoying thing that I’m finding is that the Beta version of IE 8 that comes can’t be upgraded to the RC1 version they just put out this week.

For those of you that don’t know.  RC means Release Candidate, and is the final testing version before a software product is released with it’s final version.  The release cycles are typically:

  1. Alpha
  2. Beta
  3. RC (Release Candidate)
  4. RTM (Release to Manufacturing or Release to Marketing)
  5. GA (General Availability)

Here’s my advice to you as far as Internet Explorer 8 goes.  If you insist on using IE, make sure you’re using at least IE 7.  I would not start using IE 8 until it’s released in a final version.  If you’re only using IE because that’s what came with your computer, do yourself a favor and go and download Firefox (for free) right now.  It is way faster than IE, much more secure, and will give you a much getter browsing experience.

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Apple 24″ LCD Cinema Display – WOW!!

January 16th, 2009

As I mentioned last month I was considering getting an Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display to compliment my Macbook Pro.  A few weeks ago when I finally got my fantasy football winnings for this year I pulled the trigger and ordered it from PC Connection.  After checking around with a few places I was pretty happy with the deal I got from PC Connection.  Due to them not charging for any taxes I was able to get a better deal there than I could have gotten through my neighbor who gets discounts from Apple through his work.

Considering that I work with dual 19″ monitors at work daily I didn’t think I’d be too impressed with a 24″ and was really actually kind of bummed that a decent 30″ like a Samsung 305T or a Dell UltraSharp 3008WF was so expensive.  I must say that I am more than blown away after using the 24″ Apple display.  At first I was really considering not getting the Apple since it didn’t have any HDMI or DVI inputs (for watching HDTV, etc).  But after I realized that I really wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be using this monitor to watch TV and the fact that without this monitor I would have to buy a Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter ($99 – to hook up a different monitor) and an extra power adapter ($79 – for convenience) the decision got much easier.

What really stands out the most with this display is just how bright the thing is.  With the LED display it goes from off to maximum brightness in an instant.  Also since it’s LED based the power it uses is much less than a comporable LCD display.  Having both LED displays in the laptop and the monitor really make you realize how crappy older flat panel monitors are.  Once you use an LCD display, you won’t want to go back.  In addition to the power savings that the LCD offers this monitor boasts the same environmental (“green”)  changes that Apple made to the Macbook.  Everybody’s “going green”!

Overall I’ve been very happy so far with the display.  Unfortunately the room that I’m turning into my office here at the house is a work in progress so I haven’t been using it daily, but when I have used it I have really been sad when I’ve put it away.  As much as I may like to, having it sitting on the dining room table with a family of 5 just isn’t practical :)   Once the office is done and I get it mounted (I picked up the VESA compatible mount too) I’ll definitely post more about it and how well the dual setup with the Macbook Pro works.

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Picasa for Mac, finally!

January 11th, 2009

Google has finally released a version of their Picasa desktop application for Mac.  I have been waiting for this for a while and it couldn’t come a minute sooner.

Our iPhoto library here at home is over 63GB and has almost 16,000 items (photos and movies) and gave me a big scare a few weeks ago when the library wouldn’t show any pictures except for the ones that I had imported from my camera in December 2008 (this was still in December).  Luckily I was able to copy the library off to another hard drive, open the backup copy and do some maintenance to get it working.  But we did lost the pictures that had worked from that December upload.

I think what I would need to do with iPhoto is break our 1 big library into smaller libraries, maybe by year to keep that running more smoothly.  I think I’m going to work on pulling everything out of iPhoto and moving it into Picasa.  This is also because our Flickr service is up for renewal and I don’t think I want to continue with it.  I have been putting pictures on Picasa’s Web Albums lately and I like that much more than Flickr.

Between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Picasa, I really must say that I’ve been very impressed with all of the Google products that are now a part of my daily life.

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New Mac Hardware

December 12th, 2008

Earlier this year I decided that I wanted to get a new laptop.  I really was interested in the Macbook Pro line from Apple but knew they were in the middle of a release cycle so I started to do my homework.  As the months passed rumors started to circulate containing details about the new Macbook Pros that were going to be out in the fourth quarter of 2008.  So I kept waiting and doing my homework, and finally the product launch event came where they released the details.

Shortly after the launch event in October I placed my order for one of the new 15″ Macbook Pros.  Some of the cool new features that made this model worth waiting for were:

  • Precision aluminum unibody enclosure
  • Ultrathin 15-inch LED-backlit display
  • High-performance NVIDIA graphics
  • All-new, smooth glass Multi-Touch trackpad

The standard technical specifications show what you get out of the box.  The options that I configured my 15″ with are:

  • Processor – 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  • Memory – 4GB 1066Mz DDR3 SDRM-2x2GB
  • Hard Drive – 320GB Serial ATA @ 7200

The machine has definitely shown that it’s quick and very solid.  I have no problems running VMWare Fusion with Windows 2008 Server for my Windows development (using Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008).  I was initially a little disappointed that they didn’t revamp the 17″ Macbook Pro at the same time, but after further consideration I figured that it would probably be smarter to get the 15″, which will save me some money, and probably pickup an external display later.  Because I was going to use this laptop as a desktop replacement, I definitely needed some way to work with more screen real estate than the 15″ display offers.

Fortunately (or un-fortunately) for me Apple also previewed a new 24″ LED Cinema Display at their October 2008 launch event (a review can be found here).  And while it wasn’t going to be available to ship until late November, it’s features made it a perfect match with the new Macbook Pro line.  Not only is it a stunning display but it also basically works as a docking station for your Macbook or Macbook Pro (the new ones, that is).  So while the price tag may seem high initially, by the time you factor in buying a display adapter so you can hook your new Macbook’s mini-display port to a non-Apple monitor, and another power brick that you can leave at home, you’re probably in the same ballpark as any other non-Apple monitor with comporable specs.  And, none of those models will be LED backlit (which, as you can see here is very good with power usage and environmently friendly – like the Macbook).

Anyways, luckily for me I’ve done pretty well in Fantasy Football this year.  My winnings from that at the end of the season will probably cover most of the price for the display.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will go on sale or I’ll find some coupon code by then :)

More reviews of the LED display can be found here.

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