Aqua-Soft ForumsFirst: Excellent new forum topic.
Second: Switching anxiety. Never owned a Mac and am very curious about Virtual PC. What are your experiences? Pros and cons.
[question] Virtual Pc
Works very well. Just slower of course and you will lose some connectivity. IE some USB devices mess up and things like that. But for software it works fine.
I run Virtual PC on both my iBook and my PC.
Don't have any real problem with it on either paltform however it is slower on the iBook.
VPC for OS X creates a virtual x86 CPU at half the clock speed of the CPU in your Mac.
Don't know why and Connectix and MS don't have an answer.
It doesn't use your video card either it use's it's own 4 or 8mb card(can't remember which), Which is horrible.
So what are you typically running in VPC? Like, would Picasa performance be so drastically reduced it's not worth running? Do you keep VPC always on in the background? Thanks for the replies so far, any more information?
no I think VPC should be able to handle Picasa. Also its a totally seperate app so its not running in bg. Also you can F-Screen, when my mate saw WinXP running on my PowerBook he went crazy 
Virtual PC works well and no performance diminished from my pc to my g4 laptop. The only disadvantage is that installing 2 Operating Systems on your HD takes up nearly 10 gigs, and that's 16.667% of my 60 gig hard drive. 
What about games. Can you run Windows games on VPC on a Mac? (For example if its a G5 mac which suposably is the fastest so far)
my answer is
Originally posted by Sharkit use's it's own 4 or 8mb (virtual/pseudo/thing) card
Originally posted by Shark@Jan 9 2004, 07:50 PMIt doesn't use your video card either it use's it's own 4 or 8mb card(can't remember which), Which is horrible.
Weird... Any marked improvements to be expected in VPC 7.0? 
The MS version of Virtual PC is supposed to get better, but it's only gonna get better for the PC version.
Doesn't make sense though.
This is M$ only chance in hell of getting their OS installed on Apple hardware, you would think they would want it to run flawlessly in the MAC version as well.
M$ probably get money from Intel so getting people to buy a PC means they get more money than they would if they got people to install Windows on a Mac. 
Especially as they consider Apple to be the only home market contender when it comes to operating systems. (They consider all versions of Linux to be server OS' <_< )
Originally posted by rjohnstone@Jan 19 2004, 03:19 PMThe MS version of Virtual PC is supposed to get better, but it's only gonna get better for the PC version.
Doesn't make sense though.
This is M$ only chance in hell of getting their OS installed on Apple hardware, you would think they would want it to run flawlessly in the MAC version as well.
Exactly. Doesn't seems to be making sense.
*Sigh* They are not exploiting the chance to garner more support from the Mac users...
VPC likes free RAM. The amount of ram setup for your emulated machine plus another 64MB should be available. Just make sure OS X is not forced to use virtual memory for your "emulated memory" for the virtual machine, if it does you get great performance hits.
With 512MB in your machine 192MB for the virtual machine is good, with only 256MB in your mac settle for 128MB or 96MB for the virtual machine.
The overall performance you get out of your emulated PC is roughly a Pentium III with half the megahertz for your Mac. I have a 700MHz G4, benchmarking in the emulated Windows says I am in the range of a 400 to 430 MHz PIII. Or good enough for most work 
. It is recomended you use Windows 2000 for VPC, WinXP is way more hungry for resources.
VPC works good for all productivity applications. And the network transparency is great, Windows in the emulated machines sees your host Mac as another Windows machine on it's network. I mostly use it for running DC++ as far to many hubs banns all other clients, besides that I no longer have any need or VPC, all other apps I need exists as native OS X apps anyway.
Playing games is not feasible. Mostly because VPC does not provided a passthrough to your Mac's 3D card, nor does it emulate a graphics card with 3D capabilities. Which means that DirectX is running in software mode. And most modern games does not support DirectX in software mode 
.
How can you guys say that VPC is good? I am running 6.0 from connectix and with Windows 2000 SP4. It is slow as molases. Opening my computer takes a good deal 3~5 seconds. IE is infinitely stuck at the resolving DNS stage.
This is on a G4 800 ibook. I have 640MB of ram and 60gig HD. And i have the connectix drivers installed under the guest operating system. VPC is crap, simply put.
Now on the contrary, Remote Desktop Connection from Microsoft is really really fast almost native performance. It also passes on audio. That's what I use instead of VPC.
@n3urotic - Get the version 6.1. It has a few more performance tweaks and bug fixes.
Only bad thing about 6.1, it has an MS logo on it now.
I have a copy of the latest MS Virtual PC 2004 and it blows.
The only good thing about it was they FINALLY gave it a true Vesa 2.0 compliant video emulator, so now I can now load Darwin or Solaris x86 in a VPC session.
It still has the lame 4MB video card emulation though, so forget running any good games or graphic intensive stuff on the VPC.
But hey... at least it's not VMWare. That thing really sucks. 
Also note that VPC sacrifices screen updates to give more power to the actual running applications. This will make it look like it is slower then it actually is as the graphics does not run along.
But saying it is ultra fast would be a lie . make sure to NOT run WinXP on it as WinXP is quite heavy on resources. Using Win2k instead will give you a significant performance boost.
I am waiting anxiously for the version 7 to come out, cant wait to try xp on my dualie!
I know a Mac developer, he has it as well as messenger 3.7 for Mac and says its blazing fast compared the the version 6!
About the MSN messenger, it apparently doesn't support video audio chat yet... :rant: what is wrong with them
Originally posted by silencedge@Jan 19 2004, 07:12 PMExactly. Doesn't seems to be making sense.
*Sigh* They are not exploiting the chance to garner more support from the Mac users...
neither is mac for pc. would make sense for them :canadian: :canadian:
-bunkka