Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

I rebuilt my twin screen PC under Windows 2000 and, as expected, it was a simple, straightforward job. Then I loaded VMware Server.

First of all, VMware asked if I wanted to download the new, improved version and I said "yes". As others have discovered before me, this was not a good idea. The first clue was that v2.0.0 is now a whopping 590MByte download, against 1.0.6's sprightly 149MByte. Still, there must be good things to come from all these extra bytes. Perhaps, but not for someone who wants to run on a paltry little AMD XP 2200+ with a miniscule 1GByte of RAM. The good news was that I could keep the Task Manager's performance pane open on one screen, as my outdated box struggled manfully to cope with the demands of the new software. Performance, as the saying goes, sucked. Badly.

So I uninstalled V2 and re-installed V1.0.6.

This should have been the end of the story except, that I discovered something I hadn't known before. All our other PCs are Pentium based, this is the one and only AMD box we have. So all our virtual machines were created on Pentium kit. Well, here's a thing: VMware won't run a guest built under one chipset on a host running a different one.

To be fair, the console will tell you that this is a bad idea but I thought "everything that runs on Pentium runs on AMD XP". No it won't, not if it's a VMware virtual machine. If you ignore the warning and start up the guest, the first time you try to do anything you'll get an error. Living in my closeted Intel bubble I hadn't realised there were major compatibility issues, even though other, wiser heads clearly knew there were.

Apparently, all is not lost. It's alleged that this problem only affects 'Suspended' guests. The theory is that you can migrate a 'Switched Off' guest quite happily. I need to try this and see.
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