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#1
Need help running MS VPC/VHD on VMPlayer
I've been using the free VMPlayer to run a guest Win7-32 system on my Win7-64 host, and it has worked well. I like it much better than Microsoft's VirtualPC, which has been very flaky for me. Now I want to try VMPlayer with a free vhd image that Microsoft offers to try out the full Visual Studio product.
I've seen several places on the net that say VMPlayer can mount VHD and VPC files natively, but I saw others that imply you first need to run it through VMware converter. That's a small, free download, so I installed the standalone Converter 5.0. But when I tried to mount the VPC in VMPlayer, I got a message saying that Converter was not configured correctly, uninstall it and try again.
Converter gave me no options during the install to configure anything but the install folder, and I used the default for that, so I don't see what good reinstalling it would do. So I'm asking the experts:
a) do I actually need Converter to run VirtualPC images in VMPlayer? I would rather not have two 50GB images if I only need one. If you run a vpc file on VMPlayer, is it slower than if you run a conversion? Are the answers the same for VMWare's Workstation, which is evidently more powerful than VMPlayer?
b)if I do need Converter, what am I missing about the install that makes VMPlayer give me that message? I would guess that if I converted the image first and then opened it in VMPlayer it would work, but again, it's 50 freaking GB, and that would take up almost all my free space, and probably take several hours to run, so I don't want to do it unless I have to.
Thanks for any help with this.