Opportunity Knocks

Here is a common issue with VMWare Player.  The guest operating system’s screen is equal to the resolution of your host screen, so that you can either run it full screen or have it partially obscured and use scroll bars to see things along the edges (like the “start” button).  Or perhaps you wish to be able to view the whole guest operating system screen and still have a way to see applications running on your host operating system.  In my case, it tends to be the latter, but this solution will work for either problem.  Inside of the directory where your guest operating system is stored, there is a file with a name like guestOS.vmx.  While VMWare is not running, open your text editor (Vi, Emacs, Notepad Wordpad, or whatever).  On Windows, I use Wordpad instead of Notepad, because the file may havebeen created on a different operating system and Notepad may not read it properly.  Add the following snippet at the bottom of the file and save it.

# Set maximum screen size -- added Dec 26 2006
svga.maxWidth = “800″
svga.maxHeight = “600″

One possibility is that you will find that the file has pre-existing entries for these.  If that is true, comment the former entries out by entering the “#” character at the beginning (left side) of the lines where svga maximum values are set.  In this way, if you decide to move the virtual machine (VM) to another host computer, you can switch back to the original values by uncommenting the former values and commenting the values you add.

UPDATE, 2007-10-21: There is a problem some people have with version 2 of VMWare Player, where the mouse is unable to reach the edges of the screen.  JRI Panama solved it (in part with information from this article) this way:

And it did not solve it. However, I decided to run the guest machine at 1024 x 768, so I change these lines accordinly and resize the screen resolution on the guest machine and the problem went away. The mouse can be moved freely when switching from the host to the guest.

svga.maxWidth = “1024″
svga.maxHeight = “768″

Also, if you copy and paste, remember that the quote marks you see are probably "curly", while the software expects regular straight quote marks or sometimes none at all.  If you hand-replace the quotes or even remove them, it may work acceptably.