VMware Player 3.0 Now Can Create Virtual Machines And Support Aero in Windows 7

VMware Player is a free tool offered by VMware that allows you to run multiple virtual machines on your desktop computers. The latest version 3.0 has added some cool features and has better native Windows 7 support.

One of the nice features in VMware Player 3.0 is the ability to create a new virtual machine from scratch, which you wouldn’t be able to do in any previous versions. Before, I would have to either use the paid version VMware Workstation or free VMware Server to create a new virtual machine prior to use it on a machine that only has VMware Player installed.

Creating a new virtual machine that runs Windows 7 in VMware Player 3.0 is a very straightforward process. Simply click Create a New Virtual Machine to start with.

And then indicates where the installation media is located, either from DVD-Rom, or an ISO image file. I chose from an ISO file in this case.

Put in some basic information for Easy Installation, you can skip the product key for now and click Yes to continue anyway when prompted.

And specify the name of the virtual machine and where it’s going to be saved.

You can leave the default disk settings as is, and click Next to go to the next step.

If you have other specific hardware related things you want to change before the new virtual machine is created, you can click Customize Hardware… button to make the final adjustments there.

Once you click Finish button, and because you have Power on this virtual machine option on, the newly created virtual machine will automatically boot up.

30 minutes later, I have another virtual machine that runs Windows 7 Professional ready. The whole process is quite smooth.

Now, let’s see how it runs in Windows 7.

Impression #1: it natively supports the task bar so well that you can have both preview and jump list with the program.

And if you have two instances running, you will see them both from the taskbar.

Impression #2: man, it supports Aero, which is a feature that we’ve been waiting for years.

As for performance, it runs pretty smoothly on my computer but that is totally based on the hardware. The more powerful computer you have, the faster performance you get from the virtual environment.