[Bruck]

I am thinking of purchasing virtual PC and putting a version of windows on my mac so that I can run a few small applications that I have been unable to duplicate on my mac.

One is our work firewall program, written for windows only . The other is MIRC because for some reason I can't receive DCC downloads using any of the mac IRC programs. Also might be nice to see a windows desktop once in a while.


If you have virtual pc installed, does win2k/win98/ or winxp run best?

I have 1gb ram , 80gb 5400rpm drive, 1.25ghz.

Thanks

[Karim]

The winner is Win2000. Mostly because the latest version of VPC is optimized for 32 bit operations which partly penalizes Windows 98, and WinXP has a lot of extra eye candy and other built in features that consume OS cycles. Win 2000 is a good compromise in features and modern capabilities.

[Oneota]

You may want to wait 'till after MacWorld SF in January, though; MS may be releasing VPC 7 at that show (according to the rumor sites).

[spotze23]

on my powerbook 1.25 windows xp is not usable at all. and windows 2000 is damn slow. i can not imagin that anyone could use vpc for working.

i just use it to run a quake3 shell command. it slows down the whole powerbook and needs a lot of cpu-usage.

didn't connectix mention that version 6 would be much faster than 4 or 5? on my pismo windows 98 was not any slower.

[Drakino]

I run Windows 2000 on my Powerbook, and it runs well enough to do what I need.

Big peformance hint. Disable virtual memory in Windows 2000. Doing this helps a bit, since Windows likes to swap things out to disk for no particular reason. Just make sure you dedicate enough memory to the virtual machine.

And about the DCC issue, what mac IRC clients have you used? I've had no problems with XChat Aqua, as long as I have the DCC ports fowarded properly from my internet router.

[bmhome1]

XP runs fine in VPC if ALL the eye-candy animation effects are turned off, the desktop and file windows are run classic style, system restore, sound and anything else non-essential are disabled. VPC is just a Pentium II emulated and you would have to do the same with a Windows machine.

[WizOSX]

I've used XP Pro in VPC on the TiBook 500, Dual 867 MDD and an iBook 700mhz that I've owned over the last year or so. It runs fine in OS9, but slowly in OS X. And I think that's pretty well true of 98 and 2000 as well. Except that XP Pro is so much better OS than 98 that I wouldn't even consider 98. I used 98 for a couple of years very intensively and XP Pro was such a tremendous relief. Its worth the fact that it runs a little slower in VPC. I only use 2000 once in a while but again XP Pro is so much nicer, easier to use and more stable than even 2000, that I would only consider XP Pro.

If I was at all serious about doing real work in VPC I would want a machine that would boot into OS 9. VPC runs much more quickly in OS 9 on my 700mhz iBook with 384mb RAM than it did on my Dual 867 with 768mb RAM in OS X.

[WizOSX]

Obviously you're using a Powerbook that doesn't boot into OS 9, so I'd say, just don't expect much from VPC. But I'd still go with XP Pro.

[Kenneth]

Are you planning to buy the VPC 6.1 with OS Pack on it or separate?

Does M$ lower the Windows 2000 Pro license now? If so, go for Windows 2000.

For WinXP Pro.. man... with all those security holes and hotfixes.. I would stay away from XP.. even thought SP1a is out. I rather stay with Win2000 SP4.

[tooki]

OK, I know this probably isn't the answer you wanted, but the fastest Windows that will run is whatever the oldest version of Windows is that will run the software you need to run.

I mean, if you could get away with Win 3.1, it would fly (of course, it is Win3.1, so it would be more like a hang glider that's being shot at with howitzers).

Remember also that if you have access to multiple versions of Windows, Virtual PC lets you set up as many virtual PCs as you like, and even run them side by side. So you can just install multiple versions and see which works best.

tooki

[bmhome1]

The oldest OS for speed was true for VPC3 to VPC5, and still probably holds true for 3.1 and Win95, being so small.

But with VPC6, there has been a change with 98SE actually running slower than a lean, optimized XP install.

I also have found the OS9 speed boost only works for 98. Anything newer runs faster with VPC6 and OS10.2+.

Anyone expecting any useful speed with a current Windows OS in VPC will have to put in the effort to fine-tune the drive image OS to run well.

The default Windows OS is setup for Pentium 4 running it. You have to go in and turn-off all the bloat manually. At least XP provides a huge amount of customization to do that.

It's time to put to rest finally the traditional rules about VPC. The latest versions changed that. Hopefully, VPC7 won't tank speed for pre-G5's to work best only with G5.

[galarneau]

I run WinNT 4.0 w/ VPC 6 on my Pismo 400, and it works just great. Win2k ran alot slower, and WinXP was just painful.

The good thing about WinNT 4.0 is that it's WinXP's grandfather, and has all the 'stability' and 'multitasking' that Win2k and WinXP have, but with much less memory and CPU usage. On my install of NT 4 w/ service pack 6 installed, the OS uses approx. 22MB of RAM. Compare that to well over 60MB for WinXP.

Moral of the story? Run WinNT if your software allows you to. It's easy enough to aquire if you know where to shop.

[joe]

I bought VPC with XPpro as part of Office PE. It works surprisingly well on my 1.25GHz AlBook even with the default eye candy turned on. You can set XP to use "classic" mode though - which turns off the eye candy and can speed up the GUI a little.

However, after upgrading the pre-installed XPpro image through Windows Update it now reads as 295MHz instead of the original 595MHz. It didn't really seem to drop that much in performance so I wonder how XPpro determines those numbers. In any case, I'm still able to view 92Kbps Windows Media files that don't play on the Mac version of WMP with near perfect a/v sync. MenuMeters shows cpu use of 40% at the default size and 60-70% full screen. And I've been able to log into our video storage systems at work which use proprietary Windows software and transfer data back and forth using my Albook. I only use VPC for work though - so I've never tried any games. My AlBook still has Jag installed, I bought it just before the freebie Panther update.

BTW - XPpro worked out so well that I installed Win98SE from an unopened package we had at work. However, it BARELY handles video playback - forget about a/v sync - the audio seems to go in spurts with plenty of extra fuzz and background noise. The video stutters and barfs even without sound. That really surprised me since I thought the bloat from XPpro would slow things down. But it could also be that the XPpro image I have was optimized by Microsoft and/or Connectix for VPC??? I don't know for certain. But at this point I'm sorry I broke the seal on the Win98 pack. It may come in handy though since we have some older DOS-only programs I need to run. I don't know how well XPhome works. But XPpro seems to run fine on my 1.25GHz PowerBook.


PS - 2 hints for VPC settings and XPpro. Don't increase the size of the virtual PC's RAM unless you really have to. It slows down start up and especially save/restore modes. Also, unchecking Undo Drives (on by default) seems to speed some operations.

[bmhome1]

It's incomprehensible to me how other users with dual processor G4's with plenty of RAM can complain about absurdly slow VPC performance with reports of 5 minute IE launches and visible window redraws. I can't imagine what was done to get such lousy speed.

I ran XP on a 400 G3 Pismo with enough speed to run IE using DSL driving it for about 7 seconds per fully loaded page, which was only 30% slower than using dialup on Pismo directly.

Since upgrading to a 900mz card the Pismo runs XP now with about four seconds per IE web page load (about real dialup speed) and can now run WM videos and QT videos nearly full speed in small window display. 3MB jpg's on a CD run in XP slide show sequence mode smoothly enough to forget its emulation. How can't a dual G4 do at least as well?

I think the only answer is insisting on having many applications open or running other backround tasks while VPC is running. That doesn't work with emulation very well.