Mac Forum / Applications / Virtual PC / November 2004

Jeff,

1. Text-only posts work better on Usenet than MIME multipart text/html.
  Just a datapoint.

2. You should thank your lucky stars VPC7 is doing that well for you.
  Using SysInternals "bginfo" under WinXP Pro, VPC6 on my 1.5GHz
  Powerbook reports a whopping ~300 MHz.

3. VPC is a solution for people who have a small number of things that
  they *must* use Windows for.  If you're married to a particular
  Windows-only application that's very resource-intensive, and use it
  all the time, then you'll probably be disappointed.  In my case, I
  use Microsoft Access about 1-2 days every 3 months, and have little
  use for Windows the other 355-360 days of the year, so it works fine,
  but everyone's circumstances and experience is unique.

Jeffrey,
Tuning VPC 7 to your needs depends on what you're running.  If you're
running Windows XP there are a number of resource hogs you can disable
like System Restore, the Welcome screen, and a number of background
services.  I've done this and installed a disk optimizer to keep my
fragmentation low, and I've got a reasonable PC running Office 2003, a
VPN with Remote Desktop, and Visual Studio.NET 2003 EA.  For these apps,
general PC utils and supporting my relatives VPC works well and this is
in a 256mb ram configuration.