VMware is a piece of art of software which allows you to run guest operating stystems (OS) on top of the main OS you’re using. For example in my case, I run SuSE 10.0 on Windows XP via VMware. Anyway, despite having the name as cool as it sounds, installing the VMware on my machine is a pain in the rear.
This could explain why I so stated as above. The installation of VMware always gives the blue-screen-of-death on the Windows XP SP2 on the final step. Initially, I thought that some services running on my machine may cause the problem, so I disabled most of them. In addition, I also shutdown Zone Alarm, and all the running programs. Nothing helped at all. I remember, the last time I wanted to run VMware so bad, that I decided to reinstall the Windows XP.
However, after a googly (lucky-google) search, I found to the solution to the problem. There are actually lots of people encountering same/similar problems as me. And, it’s not the VMware’s problem it all, everything is behind the Zone Alarm (ZA) firewall. By shuttingdown the ZA after it is started up does not completely turn it off! So, what should be done is to go to the preferences of the ZA and deslect the option of starting up ZA automatically when Windows boots.
I’m quite happy, I have SuSE 10.0 running on VMware now, and it is not very slow. This seems to be the perfect solution to get myself back using Linux while waiting for a good time to build a dedicated system for it. 🙂