[bettafish]

I currently own a Powerbook G3, which I am completely overwhelmed with. (I have never owned a nicer machine in my life)...Now what I need it for, is basically flash animations. I own Flash MX and Final Cut Pro 3, and although it performs very well, I cant help envy the emac G4's at my Campus. I own the Pismo(firewire) Powerbook G3, and have a 20 gig hard drive, 256 ram, cd burner and dvd, airport card and Jaguar installed. For the work Im doing, I find it enormously frustrating to work with Virtual PC 6(I use 3D Studio Max, and Windows 98 runs although its on a 486 computer). My question is, does anyone use Virtual PC? What's the performance like on a G4? (In virtual PC and programs like Flash and imovie?) Is it worth the purchase of a new ibook G4? Does anyone own one and have any suggestions? I would really appreciate it! Thanks.

[zacharydz]

If your existing laptop is sufficient for you outside of running Virtual PC, I wouldn't buy an iBook G4. A much more cost effective method would be to buy a low-end PC (which can be obtain for 200 or 300 dollars and will out perform a G4 processor emulating x86 hardware with Virtual PC).

[deathvole]

Good timing, since I just got back from a trip where VPC6.1 on my new 800MHz G4 iBook played a key role. *8-)

I've maxed out my iBook to 640MB and have VPC running on a 256MB virtual Win2KServer "box". I was only using it for Visual Studio and product testing, plus some Access work.

Conclusion: VPC is no speed demon on this config, but I was very pleased with the results. My project builds were slow, but as far as editing source code, testing the app, etc. it really saved the day.

Having said that, I think you should upgrade to the G4 iBook only if you really want a G4 iBook. I can't say how much faster it will be over your G3 PB. I can only say it worked for what I needed it to do, and I'll probably be doing it again in the future. (Unless my employer breaks down and buys a work/travel laptop for me.)

And of course on the MacOS X side the G4 iBook kicks serious ass. ;-)

So now for those of you who wonder why I was using VPC - It was either that or no development for the week I was at the satellite office. They had no machine for me, no monitor, not even deskspace. Shipping my Dell (piece of trash as it is) was risky and expensive, plus it's my core dev machine. Way too risky.

Cheers,

-Deathvole

[deathvole]

And an added VPC footnote - Never try to run VirtualPC with your iBook's Energy Saver prefs set to anything other than "Highest Performance". Severe pain may result. ;-)

-DV