Upgrade to OSX Lion, Parallels 7, Windows 7 64-bit

All

Just thought I would share some experience.

On a 2010 MBP 15" Core i7 8Gb, I recently upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and from Parallels 6 to Parallels 7. I run Win 7 x64 on Bootcamp for the office email (while IT are too cheap to upgrade to Exchange Server 2010...).

After some issues I contacted Parallels tech support who recommended installing a new virtual machine (i.e. re-installing Windows 7 Bootcamp as a new VM).

This solved some issues, but created many new ones, leading me to think I had malware and getting a number of strange error messages.

It turns out that by doing this the Windows activation file key becomes unstable, lots of issues with unauthorised copies of Windows reminders even after entering the enterprise licence product key repeatedly.

Today, I backed up Win 7 files, removed Bootcamp, re-partitioned the disk, re-installed Bootcamp driver files, re-installed Win 7, and re-installed the VM on Parallels 7.

Now everything runs smoothly and fast again, no problems remain.

While this may seem obvious, I wasted several hours going through MS KB articles trying to 'fix' the activation / registry etc. files and ran many scans with SFC / scannow, anti-malware, anti-virus etc. etc.

It's a pain to have to back up the files and do a clean instal and I have not had the computer for an afternoon while it was installed, but by far this is the best solution.

Hope this helps people.

Nick