Hi,
I bought a new iMac a month ago and downloaded the trial version of VMWare as I wanted to run some of my Windows applications for a while while I transition to the Mac.
So I used the VMWare provided migration tool to make an image of my Windows laptop (which took > 5 hours to complete), and then copied it across to the Mac with a directly connected LAN cable.
Everything seemed to start up fine when I first ran the my laptop image in Fusion.
Then after a day or two I installed the VMWare tools in the guest. And then everything went pear shaped. I would get BSODs very frequently. They all seemed to be related to NDIS which I believe is the networking driver for Windows.
I didn't have a snapshot to go back too, so the best I could do each time was try and let Windows recover the error get back to a stable point.
After nearly 2 weeks of my 4 week evaluation I was wondering if this was really going to work. But in all the Googling I did about this sort of BSOD I thought that it would be worth another try again from scratch. But this time I decided to remove some stuff from my Windows laptop just to make the Image size smaller. So I emptied the Wast bin and flused browser caches and deleted stuff from the downloads folder etc. And then I realised that I had VMWare Player installed on my PC ( that I had installed ages ago for my job with a Linux Guest) and wondered if this really was a good idea. So I uninstalled it from the laptop.
My second attempt, so far, seems to have been a much better experience. I made sure I had a snapshot before and after installing the tools - just in case, but there wasn't a re-occurrence of the BSOD. My evaluation ends today and I installed my proper Fusion license yesterday.
It all seems to work quite well, in that I can still use the Web design and publishing tools in the VM while I work out which Mac tool to buy and migrate too. I have tweaked the memory configuration so that my Windows and Mac applications have acceptable performance. But I have just read in another post about whether it is a good idea to allocate all the Mac processors to the VM, so I may try tweaking this as well.
So, I am not really sure if removing the VMWare Player did the trick, or whether it was reducing the size of the image created by the migration tool, but they were really the only significant changes I made between the two attempts.
I thought I'd just pass on the experience here in case it helps someone else.
Kev