On my journey over to the "Dark Side - OSX" I had already concluded that I would still need a Windows installation in order to work with some of the PC only software ie, Sony Vegas Video Pro and Adobe Master Suite (yes I know that Adobe have released an OSX version however the copy that I have is for PC only).

A move to Win 7 also seemed to make sense since a number of my IT clients are also now starting to replace machines with Win 7 based units. Added to this it was an opportune time to migrate to Win 7 Pro (64bit).

After researching how to do this I jumped in and fired up OSX's BootCamp Assistant. Boldly I decided that since I knew that the OS alone would need about 10 gig, a BootCamp partition of 30 gig should be sufficient - the base drive is only 250 gig. Within 2 hours I had Win 7 Pro installed and updated. Adobe MS took a further 2+ hours. In total I spent about 6 hours getting this all to work.

With Win 7 installed and happy I then proceeded back into OSX and after weighing up the pros and cons of the two major virtualisation packages Parallel's "Parallels 5" and VMWare's "Fusion 3" I opted to trial Fusion 3. This proved to be a trival install. One thing that I really loved about Fusion 3 was the ability to run a virtual Win 7 based on the underlying BootCamp installation meaning that any changes made in the virtual machine were reflected in the Win 7 install when you boot directly in into Win 7 via BootCamp.

Soon I had OSX running on the main notebook screen and

Win7 full screen on the external 22" Samsung. When my daughter walk up she was a bit mystified by the two operating systems but only one MacBook Pro. :-)

Initially I didn't comprehend what Fusion 3's - "Unity" was all about but pressed the button anyway. My full screen reduced to a window. Oh well that wasn't very thrilling... but then I noticed when I clicked on the Fusion icon on the Dock It was then that I noticed a "All Programs" option... hmm that sounds awfully like Windows... so I clicked on it to discover the full program listing for my Win 7 install. Quickly I fired up ZoomPlayer my dual screen multimedia player, with in seconds it was up and running ..... looking exactly like it was running directly on OSX with no virtual screens insight!!! It was amazing to see. While it looked perfect I soon discovered that it was not up to the task of running dual screen AVI files :-( with the image jumping and tearing, and the sound cutting in and out. Still the concept worked, maybe all I need is an 8 core CPU with 32 Gig of RAM!!!

Adobe Fireworks worked much better and incredibly worked with drag and drop - as I dragged an image from "Finder" and dropped it into the waiting Fireworks - bang it openned ready for editing!! How incredible is that.

And then the party ended...

Booting back into BootCamp Win 7 I checked my disk usage... 2 gig free... ouch! Within ONE day a few necessary installs and copying of critical files later and this was down to 800mb. Clearly I was going to need more space!

No problem I would just pop back into OSX and use the Disk Utilities to shrink the OSX partition and increase the BootCamp partition.... oh DU an not change a BootCamp partition. Hmmm I guess I will have to copy my Win7 partition and then delete BootCamp, shrink OSX and set a new BootCamp partition larger say 60 gig.

Back in Win7 I fired up Acronis Home to image my Win7 install onto an external drive... whoops Acronis can not image a BootCamp partion or an OSX one for that matter, so there was not even an option to copy the whole drive, for as far as Acronis was concerned it did not exist!!!

After an hour or two on Google I discovered a solution Paragon's "CampTune" a FREE beta copy. With some trepidation I down loaded the CD image file and created a bootable disc. Now feeling much more vulnerable I set about ensuring that my Mac "TimeMachine" software was configured and a fully backup in place. (I quickly learned that you need an external drive larger than your installed one and that TimeMachine insists on owning it!)

Since I had no way to backup the Win7 install without spending more money I choose to chance losing it if CampTune went pear shaped.

Well I need not have worried as I booted into CampTune it asked about the size of the OSX partition and allowed me to use a slider to shrink one while enlarging the other, setting the BootCamp Win 7 partition to 60 gig I clicked the "Go" button and then sat back and waited. Slow minutes went by and at times nothing appeared to be happening but inside 30min it was finished. Holding my breath I flicked out the CD and rebooted.....

OSX came straight up and booted. Rebooting I held the "Option" key and was somewhat relieved to see the "BootCamp" disk symbol appear, selecting it I waited. After a lengthy pause the pulsing MS Window icon began to glow and finally a login screen. Again taking longer than perviously Win 7 launched and connected to the network no worse for wear!!! I was overjoyed. It sure does pay to dig around, you never know what cool free tools are lurking out there.

I am now working toward replacing the original 250 gig HDD with a proper 500 gig unit.