IT Professionals

Vista – A Saga In The Making

Posted by on Mar 23, 2007 | 8 Comments

So I took the lazy way out and tried to install Vista via Parallels. Seemed like a good plan – until I tried to connect to the Internet, that is. Now I believe that this has to be an issue with Parallels and the virtual hardware detection for all three network cards. Two of them are integrated and one RealTek standalone. And even if this is an issue with Vista directly, I am all right in buying a card known to work with the OS as this is something we face with wireless in the Linux world every day. It’s not a big deal.

With that, here is my question: I am going to be spending a fair portion of my weekend doing the “full installation” in the “real world,” meaning no para-virtualization. Have any of you found network card incompatibilities with Vista Ultimate? If you have, please share your experiences in the comments area. I am relying on you to help me to get this OS connected to the Internet.

Something comical that I should point out is that every Linux distro I have ever tried in Parallels works with my existing Internet connection – out of the box. This holds true with my Linux compatible wireless card or any land-based NIC known to man. Doesn’t really mean anything, I just thought it was interesting.

[tags]installation,networking,vista,linux,connectivity[/tags]

  • P (Paul) King

    Matt, I have ran Vista Ultimate and Win XP Home as a dual boot.
    Also have ran Win XP Home and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS as a dual boot.
    In either case, a Netgear GA311 Gigabit PCI Adapter (RealTek)
    was used and a LinkSys 10/100 NIC with accompanying drivers
    was also found to work well. I did not try these setups w/wireless.
    kingfyre

  • mel mudie

    Matt,I have triple booted vista, xp and simple mepis without to much trouble. But when i switched to ubuntu it hogged the bootloader and would not see the vista one.So now i run it within the new vm workstation.
    mel

  • Fred Naatz

    Matt,

    I mean no disrespect; but I don’t think Parallels is meant to run an OS. It can run some % of programs that run on windows (albeit slowly); but no the full OS. That’s what Boot Camp is for.

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Fred: At first, I could not for the life of me understand what you were talking about. Parallels does indeed, run operating systems as VMs. But then it occurred to me; you must be on a Mac, hence your point about Boot Camp.

    So you are probably talking about this.

    As you can see here however, Parallels on Linux is more VMWare-like. We do not have the transition into a “single OS” as the Mac version offers.

    So in essence, you are right, but for another OS than what I am using. ;)

  • Ted McCarty

    Hi Matt, I have installed Vista on at least 10 different computers, Dell, IBM and my own clone which has a Realtek RTL 8139/810 NIC in it. So far I have had problems only when I am on the domain at work. It finds the NIC and allows me to put it on the domain and hits the Internet after I install the proxy server settings. I had no problems with instlling at home, it worked first time. I am curious about the Paralles program as I also have an iMAC running OS X.3. It would be interesting to try Vista on it, of course it is not an Intel MAC. Will Paralles work on that platform?
    Thanks, Ted

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Ted: Hi, did some checking for you and here are the sys requirements for running Parallels on a Mac.

    Support on any 32 or 64-bit Intel-powered iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook, MacBook Pro & Mac Pro Tower.

    It looks like it is an Intel kind of thing. But should you wish to play with Linux some form, you could always take a trial version of Parallels Workstation for Windows on a test drive? ;)

  • http://www.richandmelissa.com Rich Selmon

    Matt, I have ran Vista on 5 different computers with various network cards, not issues. I have also ran Vista Ultimate (RC1 & Beta 2) under Parallels with XP as the host on three different computers. I had no issues, however when using my Inspiron 9300, the “Centrino” wireless did not work.

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