I'm using VMWare Workstation 9 and am having problems with a VM I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8. I purchased the Windows 8 Pro upgrade deal from Microsoft and installed the upgrade in my Windows 7 VM (bringing the VM up from Win7 to Win8). The problem I'm having is that I can't get the full screen display to take up all available space when running the VM. The default display I got used up about 70% of my screen's width and I had to scroll the screen to pan to the left and right edges. I mean scrolling the Win8 display, not scrolling the VMWare window itself.
I was finally able to figure out how to change the display settings an the best fit I could get was to configure Windows 8 to a 1440 x 900 display. It works though I'd like to take up all of my available space for the display. I suspect that part of my problem is that VM Workstation still has this VM's configuration settings still has the guest operating system set to Windows 7. It doesn't seem that I can change that.
I had previously installed Windows 8 to a new VM using the upgrade disk and it works fine with the guest OS set to Windows 8. Unfortunately, I learned after doing this that I can't activate Windows since the Upgrade version doesn't support clean installs (this is what Windows told me when I tried using my Win8 Upgrade key to activate it). Other than not being to activate Windows this VM looks fine. Takes up the entire screen. I checked the display setting and it's set to 1600 x 900.
Then VM that I upgraded to Windows 8 (and which VMWare still shows as Windows 7 in the VM configuration settings) doesn't give a 1600 x 900 display option for some reason. 1440 x 900 is the closest fit I can get.
Anyone know if there's a way to change the Guest OS version in the configuration settings on my upgraded VM from Windows 7 to Windows 8? Also, any ideas why 1600 x 800 isn't listed as an option in the upgraded VM?