I have a company-provided Thinkpad with XP Service Pack 2 with all the requisite company-provided software. They build these machines using PXE, if I understand their explanation. (They couldn't or wouldn't simply build a VM for me, saying all machines had to go through this process.) Last night I finally decided to play with the betas (I've been using the GM product without issue with my own copy of XP) - especially with Transporter. Sounded like a way to possibly solve my problem of not having a copy of the corporate config on my MBP 17. Setting everything up was easy - installed the requisite pieces on the Thinkpad, downloaded and installed the Parallels beta mac product. (Build 3106 Beta 3) Started up Transporter on the mac and it "saw" the Thinkpad immediately on my small gigabit home network. (I have a Netgear gigabit ethernet PC card in the Thinkpad.) First attempt, I took all the defaults on the Mac, and I was able to see the network activity through Intego's NetBarrier product that I also run on my MBP 17. The Mac Transporter app was definitely chugging away, as was the Thinkpad, judging by the noise it was making. After running for awhile, I come back and find an error message on both machines, indicating a problem. Tried restarting Transporter, which came up find, but when I tried to actually start the conversion, no luck. Unfortunately, I can't locate my notes on the error - sorry about that. But the error messages were pretty vague. Even after restarting the machines, no luck. Still got error messages. I then cleared some stuff off of the Thinkpad, in an attempt to reduce how much stuff would have to be transferred. (It was about 9 gigs, in total.) When I again tried to run Transporter and start the process, I still had the same problems. Next strategy was to NOT take the defaults, which gave me a few options to muddle through, nothing horribly complicated, but going this route allowed me to setup the communications and get the process underway. I left Transporter running, talkiing to the Thinkpad, and went out to bring in the new year. Returned much later, and after waking up, I find my corporate configuration suspended in a VM! (Since I left the machine running, I can't tell you how long it took to process all that data. But it was less than 12 hours.) Everything appears to be working, although I haven't tested exhaustively. The Corporate Symantec Antivirus tool connected and updated itself, Office opened, etc. Very impressive, I must say. Sorry I couldn't provide details about the errors, but if you encounter any, don't give up. Try options other than the default settings. Upon starting the VM, there were some "New Hardware Detected" screens - and I got an error when I took the default for installing a video driver, but it doesn't seem to have mattered. Everything works. With one exception - there is apparently some Thinkpad utility that starts up when rebooting. It's probably looking for something in the hardware, which it doesn't find My only feedback would be I'd find it helpful if there were a way to somehow detail what was to be brought over - Apps, documents, music, users, etc. Somewhat like how apple does with their Migration Assistant. Having some level of granularity in the conversion process could aid the process. Any questions...
