Vista fallback fails; Mac migration derails

It's a bit of a mess around here this morning, to say the least.

I'm still trying to outfit my wife's new iPad -- the birthday gift she reluctantly accepted -- with a case so she's comfortable taking it to the office (I'm looking for recommendations here). This morning it's charging quietly in the corner.

She also wants an external keyboard and an office productivity suite (I was leaning toward iWork but my long time friend and colleague John Mello recently reviewed Quickoffice and recommends it. It also came out on top in Matthew Miller's iPad office app smackdown). But we're big Google Docs users, so I may wait until the new version of Google Docs for the iPad comes out before making a final decision.

Vista resurrection: Adding insult to injury

This morning my wife's Acer Aspire 5516 laptop lies idle on the office credenza, a victim of a botched Windows 7 upgrade -- and a failed Vista recovery. After reassuring her that I could restore it to Vista by last Friday if Windows 7 didn't work out (it didn't, of course), the machine refused to restore Vista from the recovery disks I had created. I usually make backups of my backups but for some reason I resisted the idea of creating a second set this time. So, I'll be on the phone with Acer this week to find out what to do next.

Mac Mini: Migration's never easy

As if all that wasn't enough, this weekend I was waist deep in an effort to migrate the family's seven-year-old eMachines Windows XP desktop with a Mac Mini that I bought at the same time I picked up that dubious iPad gift.

There's a lot of steps involved to complete the transition, for two reasons: I have legacy applications that need to stay on Windows XP, and the old Windows computer has three separate user accounts, each with its own iTunes library that must be migrated.

Nothing's ever easy. I ran into glitches during the rather laborious and time consuming iTunes migration process, as well as with the VMware Fusion virtual machine I created to run Windows XP and those legacy applications.

The good news is that all of my data and iTunes libraries are finally over. The bad news? I made the mistake of installing Fusion while logged onto the Mac under my wife's user account. The VM now fails to launch from within any user account but hers. The complaint? Fusion didn't have permission to read a needed file.Here's what you get when launching Fusion from the Rob account:

Unable to open file "/Users/Jan/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm/Windows XP Professional.vmdk": Insufficient permission to access file.

My wife's account had "standard" privileges. Changing all user account privilege levels to admin didn't help, however.

With my Sunday afternoon waning, I checked in with Computerworld editor-in-chief Scot Finnie, a long time Fusion user. First of all, he recommends against creating "standard" user accounts. "It's more secure, but the security is less needed."

As an administrator, I should be able to make any changes I want on the Mac. He suspects that this is a problem with VMware's security for Fusion virtual machines. "More than likely, you're going to have to uninstall Fusion and reinstall it," he said.

Great.

But even when that's resolved I'll need to address another, more troubling problem: An install of Quicken 2010 is unable to find and load my Quicken account data when running from within a Fusion virtual machine.

At this point I'm starting to wonder if this is going to work out.

In the mean time I'm stuck between two worlds. I can't retire the old machine until these issues are resolved. Until then, both machines remain sprawled across my workspace, with all of the associated peripheral equipment and cables running everywhere.

Thank God it's Monday so I can go back to my day job.