Windows and VMWare Fusion

HI Christina,
Setting up a Windows virtual machine is relatively easy and painless. Once you have the ISO image of your Windows OEM, load this into Fusion by going to the menu bar (vo+M), file, then 'New'. This can also be accomplished by hitting command+n. You'll be presented with a dialogue that has the option to install from disk image. Do this, then browse for the ISO file. After this, set up is very straightforward. You'll be asked for a username, account, and VMware will ask you most of the obligatory questions required for a Windows setup, including the serial number you were given when you purchased Windows. Once this is done, Windows will begin setting itself up without any necessary input from you. This process is relatively silent for the most part, so if you have sighted assistance to tell you what's on the screen, or can scan with an OCR application, this would be the best solution. Without these solutions, Windows does install, and makes the startup sound when complete. If the installation runs into any problems, however, you will not know.
Once it's installed, you can use command+ctrl+shift+f (that's what I use. I'm almost sure there are other ways to do this) to direct your input to the VM. To stop directing input, press command+ctrl. You'll want to turn off VO with command+f5 once you get a screen reader working on your VM, because it will intercept a good chunk of your commands thinking you're trying to interact with Voice Over.

Feel free to ask any more questions.

Hi.
Partitioning the hard drive is only required for Boot Camp. That is one of the nice things about having a virtual machine. Be aware, that Jaws will only work in demo mode in a virtual machine. Better to go with a free screen reader or something like an VDA.

Hi there,
I have also taken note of this thread as I would love to try doing this myself but it has always appeared too technical for me.
So can I go one step further. Where would I get windows 7 from? And VM fusion from the app store? I know nothing about this.
Oh, and the steps you provided above, these can all be achieved without sighted help?
Thanks all for answering my questions as well. :)

Hi Christina,
Your questions are good ones. I'll try to parse them out.
There are major differences between working with boot camp and working with a virtual machine. With boot camp you need to partition the hard drive and restart your system between swapping oses. This method makes all of your hardware available to windows, but you do not have any access to your Mac whatsoever. It is useful for it you are running something very performance heavy or are going to be in windows for a considerable amount of time.
With a virtual machine, your flexibility increases with a slight performance hit. I think the statistic is windows gets ninety percent of the hardware resources. You can easily run a screen reader and an office program in this configuration on any modern Mac. You also have access to your Mac's file system, and can transfer things between systems easily. Fusion will also let you specify the vm's maximum resources on setup. This is useful if you just need to do a quick thing in windows.
You mentioned excel a few times. I am a slight spreadsheet guru. Have you tried the latest version of apple's numbers? It works great with formulas, not so great with graphs. Just throwing it out there.
Hope this helps. Oh, before you go partitioning hard drives, be sure to have a clone or at least your use your data backed up. Even if you partition with free space, something could still go wrong.

Hello Christina. I am running a macbook air with 8 gigs of ram. I am using the default of 2 gigs for the vm. It was mentioned to me that more would not be necessary. You can run jaws on it fully. You do however have to set the virtual machine to the way you like it first. If you change anything like the amount of ram used after authorizing jaws it will think it is a new machine so will not allow it to be used. So once you get that set up you will be fine.

Jaws is running perfectly on mine. One thing you can do is use narrator until you install either jaws or NVDA. This can be done with the command windows u for it. Also one other thing to consider is the jaws or NVDA key. This can be done by googling a program in windows called short keys. Someone did a very good podcast on here on how to set it up. It shows you how to switch the caps lock key with another of your choice. I use the right option key. Macs for some reason i forget now will not let you use the caps lock key for this so you need to switch it to that. Your basically telling it to switch the caps lock key to the other key of your choice and the same said key as caps lock. I hope this helps.

Hello all, I am using a windows 7 VM even as we speak! and I would just like to give you my sense on this... I don't like using boot camp sense I have to boot into windows if I really want to use it. I love using windows on a VM because then I could just swop between the two with out any problems. Lol. I would also, like to talk about how I optimize my mac to run with it smoothly. Say for instance, you have 4 gigs of ram on your mac. you would go into your settings into your VM and split that ram usage in half. so, you would have 2 for your VM and 2 for your mac's resources. Same for if you have 2 gigs of ram. I upgraded my ram to 8 so you all who have that much ram don't really have to play with it that much if you don't want to. Also, I set my processers to use 2 cors. not one as it will up the speed of the running of the VM. I hope this makes sense as I am kind of in a rush to write this. but hope that gives you all some tips on the subject.

I run a VM of Windows 7 with JAWS 15 on a MacBook Air, and to be quite transparent, it runs better than any Windows laptop I've had does. I allocate 4 gb of my 8 GB ram to the VM, and I haven't lagged or stuttered at all.

There is a pretty great program, called KeyRemapper4Macbook that allows one to remap the capslock key to the VO key, lets' you use a numpad with the FN key, and also let's you use capslock in VMware. I'm not sure if this works as well on Desktops, but a podcast was posted on AppleVis a few years ago on how to set this up.
http://www.applevis.com/podcast/episodes/new-updated-remapping-keys-your-macs-keyboard-enhance-voiceover-experience
I had to modify a few of the steps, but this worked for me, and I love it.
Here's a link about Bootcamp VS Virtual Machines -- for the most part the previous poster was correct
http://lifehacker.com/392225/dual-boot-or-run-windows-in-a-virtual-machine
One thing that they forgot to mention is that if you set up a Bootcamp partition, you can access that partition with VMware to Virtualize your bootcamp inside of OS X. Bootcamp gives the best of two worlds, but also has a few very large cons, such as not being able to resize the partition once you set it up(You could have a lot of space just sitting unused on your HDD).

Hi,

You should be given an opportunity after filling out the required information that I mentioned. I believe it is a button in the wizard…advanced settings or some such. If it does not give you that option, you can easily configure it after installing Windows (do this prior to registerring JAWS, as it will change your machine's footprint and deauthorize JAWS). You can get to your Virtual Machine's preferences by going through the toolbar, or hitting command+comma.

I appreciate all these comments, Christina, Chelsea and all; thanks from me also.
Sarah, I have a mac book air I'm afraid so no access to the CDs, so I would download VM Fusion, download windows from somewhere and install it through fusion?

You can download VMware from here
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_fusion/6_0

Keep in mind that this is a 30-day demo. After the demo is up, I believe it's about $60 to purchase a full copy of Fusion. Definitely and totally worth the money, however. It's really a phenomenal piece of software. I run Windows concurrently with Mac, and the Windows OS is smoother than any other high -performance PC I've owned.

The only trouble you might hve though is if you have to run a cerial cable like I do. I have a baofeng uv5r and the rt systems software, and it will not connect no matter what I do. How ever I tried it on someone else's computer and the software connects fine and dandy. and it can read the data from my radio. Just letting those of you know who want to know. lol!

Ah OK; thanks Tristan. :)

How are you all getting JA WS two authorized?

See ..,, we wont go deeply into jaws details but tkere are some ways of authorizing jaws that uses a machine footprint to make sure it is authorized in the machine it should be authorized. What happens is that changing characteristics of a viertual machine is easier than doing the same thing ina physical machine. You can add / remove hard disk space, add and remove memory, add and remove processors, do several things by making one or more commands. But, as far as the windows OS and JAWS can see, they are running on a physical machine and not on a vm so in their conception the machine footprint changes each time you do a customization.
This may break the authorization process so make sure you have the machine set up the way you klijke before making the authorization process.

You can buy an iso of windows 7 cheap probably from digital river.

Hope that helps.

a wealth of knowledge that's for sure! :)
So, some people have said here that we can purchase just a windows key from Amazon; is that right? I can use the CD to install (thanks to a super drive that a mate will lend to me) but just need to purchase the windows key.

Here's a third party that has the links to the Digital River ISO images. Note that the ISO images are not named conventionally; click the link that corresponds to your specific version/architecture.
http://www.mytechguide.org/10042/windows-7-sp1-iso-download-official-digitalriver-links/

Doing a quick search of Amazon and the genuine windows Microsoft website seems to show that you must buy a retail DVD. (Do a search for "Windows 7" on the amazon site and google "Windows 7 product key") Amazon used to sell standalone keys, but it seems this is no longer the case. My apologies for the misinformation.
You can probably find a third party dealer, such as Best Buy who can provide extremely good deals on this sort of thing, and is local to most people.
It might not be worth saying that product keys are not always necessary. This isn't illegal either -- you'll just lose some functions of Windows after 30 days of use, like Windows updates. Depending on your situation, updates may not be entirely necessary if you're using this as a second resort Virtual Machine.
Hope this helps.

Hello all
Love reading this discussion since I am currently fiddling around with windows 7 on my macbook pro. I currently have a 200gb partician for bootcamp. If I virtualize it in VmWare, will it creat a 200gb image for VmWare to use? So I'd be taking up 400gb? Or will VM be able to use the bootcamp partician with out creating it's own virtual disk?

It uses the boot camp partition. This is how you will set up windows and change options as well. O Someone wrote an exceoent guide on how to do this about a year or so ago.

Take care

Hi together,
I have just read all the possitive comments on this topic here and it seems that a lot o has changed: I have a macbook air newest generation, 8gb ram and installed win7 x64 in vmware 8 pro on osx el capitan newest version. Jaws crashes most of the time or doesn't even start after windows has booted. My bluetooth braille display doesn't get found rapidly and so on. Any simmilar experiences or solutions around here? Thanks in advance, Helmuth

Contact freedom scientific with the info and they might be able to help. As that version is recently released they still have some bugs to work out.

Don't think they will care as apple is their competitor. Just in case someone has an idea plz let me know. Best regards and thx for the info, Helmuth

hi. it would seem that the info as to NVDA and it's support for excel is old as well. as this has been worked on quite a lot in the last few versions. it is, from what i know, pritty good now. so perhaps try that, before messing with jaws in a vm.
I personally, would probably go for the bootcamp first, and vm that if you want to be running both. that way, if you want / need to, you can in fact then use the bootcamp for heavy windows use. because, if you use a vm, then decide later that you wish to use a boot camp, you will have to install a new windows to bootcamp, or remove your vm version's key, and reuse that for bootcamp. seems to me that it would be simpler to start with bootcamp, and vm that, so you have the best of both.

I've installed VMWare fusion 8, using a windows 10 virtual machine, and I've set up the successor to KeyRemap4MacBook or whatever it was called, its now called Seil. I used Seil to remap the caps lock key on the mac side to "f13", nonexistent on the mac laptop keyboard layout. I then went into windows, downloaded sharp keys and mapped the "f13" key to the caps lock key in windows. But it doesn't seem to be working and giving me the caps lock functionality I need. Can anyone shed any light on this? What am I missing?