Moving to Mac after 25 years with Windows in enterprise and home environment. There are a few legacy apps (2-3 including a mapping one) we need to run in Windows and will use coherence mode for these. Does anybody have any recommendations for a best practice minimum install for Windows 7 as we we will not require the majority of the functionality as OS X will be used for most day to day work. Does anybody have experience of http://www.rt7lite.com and how much space does this really save? Thanks Paul
Windows 7 Starter is the best solution that I found. From Wikipedia: "Windows 7 Starter is the edition of Windows 7 that contains the fewest features. It is only available in a 32-bit version and does not include the Windows Aero theme. The desktop wallpaper and visual styles (Windows 7 Basic) are not user-changeable. Microsoft originally intended to restrict users of this edition to running three simultaneous applications but this limitation was dropped. This edition is available pre-installed on computers, especially netbooks, through system integrators or computer manufacturers using OEM licenses." I have been running it for a while now. It has worked very well for me. I use it to run a legacy 8051 Integrated Development Environment (IDE). In coherence mode the wallpaper and visual styles are not visible, but they are actually changeable if you are willing to tweak the registry. I changed the wallpaper, because I was visually offended by the default. I have in the past used the "lite" family of Windows installers to create custom installations. This is much simpler and it has yielded much better results. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Many thanks for suggestion. Looked seriously at Win 7 Starter and was tempted but as setting all this up on 2013 iMac wanted to stay 64 bit, although in practice not sure that will make much difference now for the few apps I need to run in Windows but may be in future if the apps are updated to 64 bit. I did experiment with rt7lite which is free and it is interesting (definitely worth looking at) in that you can permanently remove components down to quite small levels but in many ways is more orientated to streamlining large roll outs. In the end I decided that for relatively small amount of space I would save and not knowing if I may unwittingly cause some issues with Windows 7 under Parallels I did a traditional install of Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit and will disable as many components within Windows as possible. Having said that been really impressed at how fast Windows 7 run on the 2013 iMac 2.9 i5 8GB RAM (Fusion disk) in coherence mode and only currently about 2GB install (before I put my 3GB Quo maps on!)
As long as OS X is 64 bit and Parallels is 64 bit, I am not convinced that Windows 7 being 64 bit contributes much to the virtual machine. This is just my option and I have no hard proof to support this assertion. If you are bored one rainy afternoon with nothing better to do, you might consider making a Windows 7 Starter virtual machine. I find it's lack of unnecessary features, refreshing. I also believe that it runs faster because it has fewer background tasks (daemons) running. I also believe that Windows 7 will be an unsupported OS before you are forced to all 64 bit applications.
