I recently purchased a MBP that has a 2.6 GHz i7 Quad-Core, 16 GBs of RAM and 1 TB of SSD storage. I purchased from Amazon a Win Pro 8.1 x64 English 1PK DSP OEI DVD. I followed the disk installation under Fusion, but I found when I typed in the security code, it was very hard to read and I put it in incorrectly. When the Win8 installed began, it reported the invalid code and the installation just looped over and over with the same message. So, I started a new VM and this time put the code in correctly. This time installation went well, but I had two VMs for Windows 8.1. I figured out how to delete and rename VMs so it appears everything is working as expected.
My questions are what's the recommended number of cores and how much RAM to assign to the 8.1 VM? I presently assigned two cores and 4 GBs of RAM. I'm also interested in installing other VMs, like Ubuntu, but do I need to build my own VM or can I use prebuilt VMs?
Thanks so much for the great product. This is the first time I've installed Windows on a Mac the I didn't use Boot Camp first. Now I just need to figure out how Windows 8.1 works.
Thanks,
Gerry