Mac Forum / General / Networking / July 2005

Whether Virtual PC will be satisfactory for you or not is very dependent upon
the nature of the software you will be running under it. In my own case,
which may or may not have any relevance to your needs, I use Virtual PC to
host an application development environment, Dyalog APL, where one usually
spends far more think time than anything else. I've benchmarked Virtual PC
and compared my results with published benchmarks of the development
environment running on a variety of PC hardware and, in my case, my Macintosh
at 1.67 GHZ is running at the equivalent to a PC running at about .8 GHZ.
Another thing to consider is that in terms of graphic performance the ratio
of performance between Virtual PC and a Mac becomes significantly more biased
than when comparing just a comparison of computing power. Finally, don't
count on Virtual PC to be at all useful for playing sound.

Hope this helps.

A cheap used slow box will be as fast if not faster than VPC on a good Mac.
In my case, My can't remember GHz P III Win2K can't remember RAM box is
faster than VPC 7 WinXP Pro on my 1 GHz G4 10.4.2 1.25 GB RAM PowerBook.
Still I usually use the PowerBook/VPC cause I get a sick thrill from doing
so.

Yes, I use it regularly on both an 867Mhz Powerbook G4 and a dual 1.8
Power Mac G5. Works fine for what I need it for, which is running
Quicken UK. Not really recommended for highly interactive stuff though
- games, and as another poster mentioned audio apps, are right out.

You mention Win98 - actually NT 4 or any later NT-derivative will run
more quickly than the DOS-based 95 or 98. There's a bug, though I'm
uncertain whether it's in DOS or in VPC, which makes those environments
slower. Personally I run W2K on it, with all networking capabilities
switched off because I don't need them (and thus am protected from the
vagaries of running old versions of Windows on the internet). XP runs
fine too, though takes an age to initially boot. However, much like
using a laptop I don't actually reboot the PCs at all, I just save
their state on quit and restore their state on startup.

Better solution than a real PC for me because of laptop use. I do a lot
of my accounting work on the train, where lugging both a Powerbook and
a PC laptop is not feasible. Also, I like having backups of the entire
PC to hand, ready to go if something should happen to my working image.
You could do that with Ghost and re-image a real PC, but it still
wouldn't be as fast or convenient as just copying over a VPC disk image.

I also run Ubuntu on it - this is less successful because of the
somewhat feeble emulated graphics card. X11 runs like a dog, but
text-based stuff is fine. I -very- rarely start this image up though -
it's just there in case I need to try something I've written under OS X.

Cheers,
Ian