Shrinking VMware images
VMware is a really nice product to use; it should save me heaps of problems with my machine while working on different projects. But even with a new laptop with 200Gb disk space I seem to be running short. In part because of the loads of pictures I keep on my disk and in part because these virtual disks tend to be rather large.
Cleaning up my pictures is something I just need to do, guess I should just remove a bunch and archive the bulk of the remainder to an external hard drive. Guess there is no way around that, I really need to do it myself 
But when it comes down to VMware disks there is a nice solution called Invirtus called vOptimizer. I used this for a test and turned a 38Gm Vista images into a 13.5 Gb file. Still a big file but less than half, very impressive 
. And the desktop version costing $ 76.00 is just about free when you are paid in Euros So you would expect me to buy it right? Well I would except for one small problem and that is the fact that it only runs on a 32bits host and I am running the 64bits version of Vista. They tell me that a 64bits version is coming, in fact they offered to include me in the beta, so stay tuned for more.
Enjoy!