#235: VMWare Fusion & WKO+
You can ignore this post if you are not a Macintosh user that wants to setup WKO+ on their machine.
After getting a new MacBook a few weeks ago to replace my old pre-Intel MacMini, I wanted to have it work with my WKO+ Training Peaks software. I had installed a copy on my work laptop and that has never sat well with me since it is not really my laptop and not fully in my control.
I started out by setting up Boot Camp (the free Apple solution). It worked just fine but the rebooting got a little bit old the 2nd time I had to do it. I decided to try out VMWare Fusion. The first setup I tried was to mount my Boot Camp partion, but that is less flexible (takes up a a set number of GB of harddrive space). I ended up settling on using Windows XP using a regular VMWare Fusion virtual machine. It loads pretty quickly and hasn’t been an issue for me. Knowing that the WKO+ registration is pretty picky about moving it, I have a backup virtual machine zipped and stored in a backup location. After experimenting with it for a few weeks, I went ahead and paid for the software (there is a 30-day trial). Definitely worth $80.
As for backup, I have been using a Mozy home account for a while now and despite the fact that the software occasionally has to be uninstalled and reinstalled, it has already saved me one time when my MacMini drive laid down on me a few months back. I put a new drive in the Mini and recovered all the files a little at a time by downloading them (the DVD option is pretty pricey IMHO, I figured it would be $80 or more to get my files back in that form). I started out backing up my WKO files using a little .bat file scheduled to run daily to move the files to my shared folder which would get backed up on the Mac side. This works, but it is a lot of data moving (since my script isn’t smart enough to just add new). I ended up installing Mozy for Windows under another email account. The free version is up to 2 GB which is much much less than all the data I have.
Currently, I am just using my Garmin 705. It just mounts as a USB drive and you just drag and drop the files on an open WKO+ from within the VMWare virtual machine. The next trick that I will have to figure out is to work with my older Polar CS600 as I start to ride my TT bike. I will need to get the Polar IRDA USB adapter to make that work.
This type of post is a bit off my usual type of post, but I didn’t find this sort of thing spelled out like I wanted when I was trying to figure this stuff out. Since I have, I figured I would share.
I have always been a Mac guy, and my new one is the best yet. I like that I can do 95% of what I need in the MacOS environment and use VMWare Fusion to handle the only application I use that requires Windows.
