Idiot needs help (multiple issues)

Discussion in 'Installation and Configuration of Parallels Desktop' started by newbie21, Jan 6, 2012.

  1. newbie21

    newbie21 Junior Member

    Messages:
    10
    Okay, I'm an idiot. Here's the story.....


    Background
    I'm relatively new to the Mac environment. Being a Windows guy for a long time, I set my Mac (Snow Leopard) up the way one typically does in Windows - an Administrator account and a separate lesser-privileged user account (call it USER). This was probably a mistake(??) in the Mac environment .... but it's what I did.


    XP Adventures
    I had been meaning to migrate my Windows XP Media Center Edition environment with all the Windows apps to a VM on my Mac for a while. I had a brand new copy of Parallels v5 given to me by a friend so I installed Parallels under the USER account on the Mac. I then used Parallels Transporter to migrate the XP MCE environment to the Mac in the USER account. It was only then that I found out that the unused Windows XP Pro key I was going to use to activate the XP install wasn't going to work.

    I called Microsoft and asked them if they would 'swap' me a valid MCE key and 'kill' my XP Pro key in a 1:1 exchange. They were amenable to doing this, but because my XP MCE install was a HP OEM install they couldn't do it.

    So, I have an XP VM sitting on the Mac taking up disk space which I can't activate, and is hence useless.

    --> Question 1: How do I permanently delete the XP VM from the Mac?


    Windows 7 Adventures
    Since I can't activate the XP environment, and since I'd have to install all my apps manually anyway I bit the bullet and bought a copy of Windows 7 Pro.

    Without thinking about which account I was logged into, I installed Win 7 in Parallels under the Administrator account on the Mac. It installed ok, and I can run Windows 7 from the Mac administrator account, but I can't get access to Windows 7 from the USER account on the Mac

    --> Question 2: Can I somehow get access to Windows 7 from the USER account, or do I have to uninstall Windows 7 from the Administrator account and re-install it in the USER account?


    Thanks for any help.
     
  2. Dasha.L

    Dasha.L Bit poster

    Messages:
    8

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