Upgrade my virtual machine for VMware Fusion 4?

That's a subtle one, actually, because I'm guessing that the error you're seeing from VMware Fusion 4.0 isn't that your operating system is out of date within your virtual machine but that the VMware tools that are installed as part of the system -- so it works well with the virtualization software -- is out of date now that you're running Fusion 4.0.

So while it's always a really good idea to keep any version of Microsoft Windows up to date with all the latest patches and updates, whether you're running it in a virtual machine or on an actual PC laptop or desktop computer, that's not the problem this time. Relieved?

What you'll need to do is update the embedded VMware Fusion software instead, and that's pretty straightforward.

Let me show you how I upgraded my own Windows 7 virtual machine once I upgraded to the latest version of VMware Fusion...

First off, when you start up, I hope you used the VMware "migrate existing PC" utility for your virtual machine. If you don't see any VM's showing up, don't panic, just click on the "Migrate Existing PC" on the bottom. of the window.

All good? Great.

Launch Win7 and here's what I'm guessing you see:

Ah, there's that pesky error message! I can see how you might think it's saying that your version of Windows 7 is out of date, but it's all about VMware Fusion and nothing about Win7 itself.

To proceed you need to completely shut down -- not pause or suspend -- Windows running in the virtual machine...

In Win7 it's the "Shut down" link on the start menu, as you can see above.

Once it's shut down, you'll find that there are options on the "Virtual Machine" menu that are now available, most importantly the "Settings..." option:

Choose "Settings..." and you'll be amazed just how many options there actually are for you to tweak and adjust as you might desire:

To fix this specific problem, however, you'll want to click on "Compatibility".

You can see that there are three choices here: compatible with Fusion 4, compatible with Fusion 2 and 3 and higher, and compatible with Fusion 1. To avoid the error messages in the future and just because it's the smart move anyway, choose the top one, the recommended option of being compatible for Fusion 4.0 and above.

Next time you start up Windows 7 once you've made this change, you'll see it boot up normally then change the VMware Fusion utility configuration within Windows itself:

When that's done, you're done, it's all fixed, and you shouldn't be bothered by this message in the future.

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