VMware Fusion Tools Update Problem

I use VMware Fusion on my Mac to run Windows XP. It has Tools that need to be installed to load your disks and drives etc and great though Fusion is, some of these Tools updates are a pain.

VMware Fusion

I use Windows XP purely for checking out websites on Internet Explorer and occasionally checking a Microsoft Office document in it’s native format. That’s it. I prefer my Mac and OS X doesn’t let me down.

This isn’t a rant, so before it goes that way, let me quickly go back to talking about VMware Fusion. This is a great bit of software and it lets you set up ‘virtual machines’ on your Mac that run side-by-side with OS X without the need to reboot. I prefer this to Apple’s own Bootcamp as it suits me for my testing purposes. (Yes, Windows/Internet Explorer really are testing…) If you are a new user to the Mac operating system, or you have converted and still have a bunch of software you bought and want to use, virtualisation software like this (or Parallels & Virtual PC) are ideal. You can read more about VMware Fusion on their website here: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/.

Once you install Fusion, you install your guest operating systems – you can install several including Windows, Linux etc then install the Tools to get the most out of your graphics devices, tablets and the like.

I am currently (at the time of writing) using Fusion 3.1.1 to run Windows XP SP3 and was prompted to install the free update to 3.1.2. I did and it went without hitch until I got install/update the Tools. This hung. I tried several times without success, lots of restarts and removals of the Tools from the Control Panel. Finally, I followed the advice on this VMware forum thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1165636#1165636 and deleted some files before shutting down Windows. I then removed it from OS X and re-intalled my previous version. I ran the Tools installer and this time, everything ran smoothly.

Fusion lets you take Snapshots of your system to rollback to. I’ve just created a new one!

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