So far... not loving it.

So I'm trying to get Windows XP on my new mac-mini, and I'm sitting here with three Windows XP CDs, licence numbers, the mac-mini, an old PC, and a USB drive - *MORE* than enough to build a Windows XP environment in, what, 10 minutes?

Firstly I'm disappointed that Parallels doesn't offer me an off the shelf XP environment (or anything else) as part of the set-up, all I'd have to do is provide my licence numbers, but hey-ho, maybe that's a legal thing - but I am delighted when I'm given the option of migrating my old machine across; Windows XP plus ALL my old software and settings. I download the transporter agent, plug in a USB drive, set it running, and leave the office for the day. When I get back I'm expecting the thing to have finished. Instead it tells me it will be done in 60 hours. Sixty!??! If I installed XP myself, and all the software, and all the settings, and stopped for coffee, snacks, and sleep, I still reckon I could do it faster than that. So I stop it and decide to do that very thing.

I copy an XP disc to the harddrive (XP plus SP3), plug it into the mac. Parallels detects the operating system, I click proceed, and.... error. Cannot boot. I try again. Error. I try copying a different disc (SP2). Same thing. I try the third disc. Error. I read all the so-called help documentation. My god. It basically amounts to this... "try everything"

So, the only two things left to try are A) installing across the network and B) creating an 'image' of an installation disc.

I kicked off the network installation last night and immediately it told me it would take 7 hours. By the time I went to bed it had changed it's mind to 12 hours. This morning when I got up it said it would take 60hours 14 minutes. Right now it reckons it's going to be more like 61 hours 42 minutes. This isn't instilling me with a lot of confidence. If I wait another day what's it going to say then? 2 months 3 days? What the hell is it doing?? Writing each line of code by hand?

So. People of Parallels. You have just one morning to impress me if you want your sixty quid. I'm going to try building this image file and if that doesn't work I'm off to try out VMWare Fusion.

 

So, here's an update... and you may be surprised.

Parallels (kind of) rose to the challenge & pulled it off.

I gave up on the network installation and instead started down the road of building an 'image' file. But whilst reading the help files on how to do this I noticed that it's possible for the Mac to share CD drives from other machines... *including* PCs. As this didn't seem particularly difficult (whereas creating an image file definitely did), I nipped over to the PC, downloaded and installed the necessary software from apple, shared the CD drive, popped in my XP service pack 3 CD (you know, the one that DIDN'T boot when I copied it to a USB drive!!!), went back to my Mac and blow me down Parallels could see it. I clicked continue and ten minutes later I (kind of) had an XP environment grinning at me. Well I'll be jiggered.

I say kind of because there were some hitches, and I think it's unfair to blame parallels for these. Firstly, XP spat out my ABSOLUTELY GENUINE product number. The one my PC has been using, happily, for many years. The one that it had when Microsoft brought in the Genuine Version Checking Thing. This isn't the first time this has happened to me. God only knows how licence numbers work at microsoft but I suspect they're not portable. Meaning that with every installation of XP you probably need a virgin number. Fortunately I was able to 'acquire' a virgin number from elsewhere which got me past this point and completed the installation. However, once Windows had downloaded the twenty million or so XP updates it was asking me to verify my licence again and this time the newly acquired number wasn't going to cut it. I have just 30 days to 'acquire' another one. 14 if I want to do it before my parallels trial expires (I'm not paying £60 until I have everything working).

Here's where I would normally insert a rant about Microsoft and their blinkered attitude towards licences. Where I'd go on and on about how if Windows 10 is*FREE* why isn't it possible to get a *FREE* licence for XP? How I don't mind if MS remind me periodically that there's a newer version of their OS available or that they don't support XP any more, but how I would like to use XP in the meantime and I do have REASONS why I want to! But let's skip all that and return to Parallels.

If Microsoft had been willing to play ball I might have stuck with parallels. I was a little disappointed with the so-called help documentation, a little disappointed that I stumbled across the installation process that worked for me, and a little disappointed that I'm sitting here typing this into a forum which doesn't seem to have anyone from parallels chipping in and offering advice (but then I guess I wouldn't be tempted to pay for support, which of course I really *really* am. Not.). But all that said, once it was running I was impressed. There's a ton of stuff you can do in the background to customise how your virtual PC interacts with your Mac. And once I'd played with the memory sliders it was pretty darn quick.

Two things would make me stick around and part with my hard earned dosh.
1) For godsake tell the user what the hell you're doing during the install. There's too much sitting and looking at a rotating graphic wondering if anything is actually going on. See my comments about the network migration in this morning's comment.
2) Do everyone a favour and have a drop down list of the most popular operating systems people are likely to install. Yeah yeah go ahead and insist that they bring a licence number *BUT* is it really necessary for them to bring their own disk, then figure out how to get it on a machine that doesn't have a disk drive???

Til then parallels I'm off to google how to uninstall your software.

Laters

 

Hello,

managing the expectations is path to happiness... Windows licensing is what drove me to OSX and Linux - and Parallels have absolutely no control over that. No amount of complaining is going to change that...
They also cannot distribute the OS distributions simply because MS will not allow that. Not for XPs for sure (those are "dead" and no available in any way). MS does actually provide installation iso for download for all active versions of Windows, but you have to download them (for free) yourself. No one else is licensed to distribute that themselves.
If you change hardware for any Windows XP system the genuine check fails (take WinXP drive and stick it in new machine, Windows will fail genuine check). Parallels have absolutely no control of this - really.
Most of your "problems" are simply incorrect assumptions or expectations. By now I have seen every one of them here discussed in this forum up/down 1000x.
That said, congratulations you were able to move Windows to VM - I tried few times and it failed. And one time it worked to "boot" in the VM, it crashed there and never recovered. I realized later, that I was moving from Athlon system to i7 mac mini and the change in architecture had to cause this unrecoverable major disaster. All drivers in Windows were simply totally wrong and there was no chance to get that running.

On the Windows licensing issue - I fresh-installed Windows (W7 in my case) in Parallels and used old key from my old installation on retired PC to license it and even though the hardware here must have changed totally, it worked and is working. But this was retail version of Windows and I am sure that is treated differently then other types of licenses - especially OEM licenses. OEM licenses will NOT work in Parallels.

 

Thanks for your reply Honzall. Tricky one isn't it. On the one hand I feel like Parallels should have managed my expectations better... on the other would I have continued if they had? All the best. Peter

 

This is correct, OEM versions are bounded to a specific machine, Retail versions are not, they can be moved to a completely different hardware but can't be used on two different machines at once.

 

OK, this was all helpful; I'll stop going down the path of loading my currently owned XP systems (either on a computer or the disk I own, which is possibly OEM.

So here's my question. XP would install into about 1.5G, and I understand it. I've never used Windows 7 through 10, and I already know that 10 installs into about 10 GB, too large to move onto a FATS formatted thumb drive.
So, if I want to run EPA software that runs on Windows, and want to load the system and software from a thumb drive, how do I proceed? (My Mac air has a 128G solid state drive; I don't have room for MS crap.)

 

Windows 7 is not too bad - have to use it at work and eventually, I can live with it. Windows 8 is bit more challenging, but it can be made nearly W7 looking also. But installation of W7 or W8 in VM is generally ~20Gb. The h... if I knew why and how to slim it safely down.
MY solution is this:
I got USB3 enclosure, 240Gb SSD which by some miracle I had left over from other system and put the VMs there. That thing clocks 220MB/sec read/write this way and that is plenty for reasonable VM work. There should be some thumb drives with nearly same performance.
I believe you would need to format any drive for your VM to Mac OS system, you cannot put VM on FAT drive, by the way. Formatting is easy, but finding fast enough USB thumb drive may be challenge - at least budget wise. You really need USB3 and fast one. There are some around, but likely not cheap.

You are sure that EPA software does not run in Codeweavers Crossover? There you do not even need Windows license, as that comes with emulated Windows runtime. It runs inside the Mac and when it works, it works quite miraculously. You may need to try this on your own. Its' not that tough.

 

Thank you for the tips.

I finally did get XP installed in a PVM on a thumb drive. I don't yet have the EPA software working. The XP PVM was legacy from a previous computer, and came with MS Office and other stuff which totaled about 15G. I had to reformat a USB3 drive to exFAT, which can take the larger files. Following someone's advice I measured the read speeds to be about 140 MB/sec. I'll stick with that for now, but will definitely look into Crossover - I was unaware of that software.

 

Strange, up until Parallels 6 my XP OEM worked just fine on my same MacBook that I'm now trying to install the same XP OEM under Parallels 10, that I bought for 80 euros. EXCUSE ME?

 

That's an issue with Microsoft licensing, if the activation fails, activate by phone and explain the situation.

 

Thanks for your reply Specimen, but Microsoft stopped all support for XP, so that won't work.

 

Well, Parallels cannot fix or circumvent MS licensing policies.

 

Specimen, you're turning things around: Parallels is the factor that changed, not XP.
Although you're trying to emphasize not to be working for Parallels, it seems a lot like it.
Never mind, I'll live.

 

You never actually described your problem, you came here to vent, not looking for help.

 

To explain this for the benefit of others and since I'm being gratuitously accused of being biased without substance or reason.

If the problem is that the activation of XP doesn't work, then maybe MS stopped activating XP (they may have removed the Wndows XP activation servers when they ended all support for it).
If the problem is blue screening during install: https://forum.parallels.com/threads/win-xp-sp1-install.327553/#post-768026

Now, explain to everybody how is that a Parallels issue and how does that make me biased, adding the fact you never actually described what steps you took and where you encounter an error, if you are going to accuse someone you better back up those accusations or you'll just embarrass yourself in public.