[The Placid Casual]

I need a new laptop for work (software testing. Mostly Windows and Mainframe, SQL based), and don't know which way to go at the moment... I don't need full windows compatability, just the ability to run Office, Access, Oracle, VB etc well.

I'm already pissed that there is no VPC for my Dual G5 yet, so am thinking of a 1.33Ghz Powerbook to go with the Powermac.

Thing is, I have VP5 on my old Powermac (Dual 450, gig RAM) and it is dog slow, even with Windows 2000 only. It feels like running through molasses.

Anyone know how VPC XP Pro would run on a new Powerbook? or will I have to go the way of the Vaio to get decent performance?

Cheers,

Marc

[Justin216]

No copy of VPC offers "usable" computing. It is always faster to just opt for a windows machine if anything needs to be done on a daily basis in windows. Not the answer you will want to hear, but it is the unfortunate truth. I hate using VPC even on a Dualie 1.42G4.

[Michel_80]

Cheap box and remote desktop is the way forward.

[Justin216]

My thoughts exactly

[yongfook]

PB 15" 1.33ghz, 768mb

I tried VPC6/Win2000 on the first day with my new powerbook, just to see what it was like compared to my previous G3 600mhz iBook. Suffice to say it was much better!

In fact, it felt just as fast as using a regular PC (although just not 'cutting edge'). Everything was snappy (TM) and even web browsing seemed allllmost on par with web browsing on the mac side, in terms of speed. My testing really didn't go that far though - I was just curious; I have no real need to use Windows at all. Not really sure how it fares with processor-intensive stuff. If there are any tests you would like me to do I'l try my best, but bear in mind Windows just has the default software from the install - I haven't loaded anything else on.

But, anyway it is satisfying to know that if for whatever reason I really REALLY need to use Windows, I have it in a highly useable form on my beloved mac.

[Lateralus]

I run Virtual PC with Windows 2000 on my Dual 1.4 and it is barely useable. And it is certainly not because the machine is not powerful enough to run it. It seems to be because VirtualPC will only use so much processor power. On my machine, it never uses more than 40-50% of my processor power. And yes, VPC is dual aware..

[freakboy2]

there must be some way to set up vpc where it's useable because some people say it is. i've never been able to use it because it's just so slow that i want to kill myself.

even on fast macs it's still just torture.

if you're not aware of what the guys were talking about, if you have winXP PRO on a pc, you can "remote" into the machine. as long as you're on a fast connection, the experience is 1000x better than using VPC - you just see the desktop of the remote box and use it as if you were there (your mac sends the mouse position and clicks to the remote box).

it's great. Its convinced me to get rid of my pc at home and just go mac-only.

fb

[WizOSX]

Originally posted by freakboy2
it's great. Its convinced me to get rid of my pc at home and just go mac-only.

I'm not sure I get how this will allow you to get rid of your pc at home? Do you mean that you will leave your pc at work running and then run it remotely through DSL from home?

[php]

Depends what Windows program you run on it. I have a PB 1.5 Ghz and VPC
runs a whole lot better on that than on my old G4 500MP. The only Windows program that I run with it is a real estate appraisal program that is not very processor intensive, so VPC is good for that situation. If you want to run something like a PC video editing program, or recent PC game programs, then definitely get a fast PC.

[hldan]

Okay not at all to sound rude but when some of the people on here say that VPC w/Win2000 is "barely usable" on a 1.42Ghz PowerMac I have to believe that they are trying to use it for things that it's not capable of doing such as graphics intensive programs or gaming which there's no reason to use VPC if you need those things. It's best to buy a PC. There's no shame in it. Several people have Mac and Windows.

If most of your PC tasks are going to be basic Windows apps then that's what it's for and it will run great on any new Mac 1.0Ghz and above.
The newer Macs have 512k L2 cache and that helps a lot but the 1.42Ghz models have an L3 cache of 2MB I believe so it's highly impossible for VPC to be barely usable for a machine like this unless the user has a very small amount of ram in their machine or is using one of the older versions of VPC. It just doesn't make sense for it not run great.
XP will run decent but will be much better with all the eye candy shut off but Win2000 is really the winner.
BTW my 17" 1.33Ghz w 1GB ram runs VPC 6.1.1 great. My only qualm is that it doesn't always recognize certain peripherals but that's typical for it being a software program and not the real McCoy.

[h00ligan]

the only real use i have seen for vpc in a work environment is credit card processing

everything else is available on mac

[Spliff]

I have VPC 5.1 on my iMac 600 with 512 MB RAM. That's the G3 iMac.

Virtual PC (Win2000) is definitely usable on my system. It's not fast, but it's usable. Kazaa Lite works well. WinAmp works well. Office 2000 works just great.

So, it should work very well on the new Powerbooks assuming you have enough RAM.

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by Spliff:
I have VPC 5.1 on my iMac 600 with 512 MB RAM. That's the G3 iMac.

Virtual PC (Win2000) is definitely usable on my system. It's not fast, but it's usable. Kazaa Lite works well. WinAmp works well. Office 2000 works just great.

So, it should work very well on the new Powerbooks assuming you have enough RAM.

Are you running OS 9 or OS X? Because I have yet to see any G3 run any version of Windows under Virtual PC in OS X at a useable speed. OS 9 is a different story.

[The Placid Casual]

Thanks for the relies everyone, much appreciated.

Hmmm.

Looks like it could be the Sony Vaio then.

Just seems a shame, as I didn't think the database programs I need to use were that intensive when used on a small scale... surely they should be on a par with Office in VPC unless you are using doing some severe DBMS?

Oh well. Guess the only way to find out 100% is to hunt someone down with a new Powerbook and just try it out, or go to a store for a day and set a machine up...

Wish me luck!

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by h00ligan:
the only real use i have seen for vpc in a work environment is credit card processing

everything else is available on mac

Well, it could be crucial if you need to use MS Access, MySQL, PostGreSQL, MySQL server. I use Access and some other above daily... all not on OS X at the moment.

But, I need to maintain a decent unix base so VPC or maintaining a mac box is crucial to me.

Also, stuff like IBM Rational Robot, and Win Runner could again be life savers for software testers. Again both not available for OS X.

[sillydog701]

I had a speed test on my PB 12" 1.33 (768MB RAM), running Windows 2000 under VPC. The speed is reasonable, although slightly slower than running VPC under PM dual 1.42 with 2GB RAM.
The speed is acceptable, it is not fast, I'd say, and turning off eye-candy does help.

[freakboy2]

Originally posted by WizOSX:
I'm not sure I get how this will allow you to get rid of your pc at home? Do you mean that you will leave your pc at work running and then run it remotely through DSL from home?

yeah exactly.. set up a vpn to work, and connect directly to a machine that's left on all the time. it really works very well.

as for my comments about speed on vpc my two primary experiences:

g3 600 ibook w/ 768 megs of ram and
DA upgraded to 1.25g4 w/ 1.5 gigs of ram.

like i said, maybe i didn't set it up correctly. in both cases it was unusable for just about anything.

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[thefamousmred]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
I run Virtual PC with Windows 2000 on my Dual 1.4 and it is barely useable. And it is certainly not because the machine is not powerful enough to run it. It seems to be because VirtualPC will only use so much processor power. On my machine, it never uses more than 40-50% of my processor power. And yes, VPC is dual aware..

VPC can't use more than 50% of your processor power on a regular basis because the core of the emulator is single-threaded. VPC puts some things (disk/network/video updates) into separate threads that can take advantage of the second CPU, but the primary emulation thread can only take advantage of one CPU. That's a pretty fundamental limitation of this type of emulation.

On a different note, VPC was usable for VB/SQL Server development on a Powerbook G3/266 years ago. Not fast, but usable. Both the hardware and the software have gotten much faster since then, and VPC performs quite well for Access and other database work.

I don't recommend installing Oracle though, since Oracle really wants more memory than VPC provides. In any case, there are OS X versions of both the Oracle database server and the client.

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by thefamousmred:
VPC can't use more than 50% of your processor power on a regular basis because the core of the emulator is single-threaded. VPC puts some things (disk/network/video updates) into separate threads that can take advantage of the second CPU, but the primary emulation thread can only take advantage of one CPU. That's a pretty fundamental limitation of this type of emulation.

On a different note, VPC was usable for VB/SQL Server development on a Powerbook G3/266 years ago. Not fast, but usable. Both the hardware and the software have gotten much faster since then, and VPC performs quite well for Access and other database work.

I don't recommend installing Oracle though, since Oracle really wants more memory than VPC provides. In any case, there are OS X versions of both the Oracle database server and the client.

Thanks for the info; Looks like a Powermac may be up to the job as I do do a lot of VB/SQL/Access work....

[Spliff]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
Are you running OS 9 or OS X? Because I have yet to see any G3 run any version of Windows under Virtual PC in OS X at a useable speed. OS 9 is a different story.

Yes, it clearly runs faster in OS 9. But I mostly run it in OS X for convenience reasons. Its too much of a hassle to reboot into OS 9

VPC's performance in OS X is more sluggish, but it doesn't bother me much. Then again, I only use it for short periods of time.

[mike one]

Originally posted by h00ligan:
the only real use i have seen for vpc in a work environment is credit card processing

everything else is available on mac

put your crackpipe down.

i have four analytical instruments in my lab, none of which could be run with a mac. HPLC, GC, liquid handler, uv/vis/flu plate reader. i could name tons of scientific applications for which there is NO mac option.

none of those could be run using VPC due to hardware interface issues, proprietary PCI cards, serial interface issues, etc.

[mike one]

Originally posted by freakboy2:
yeah exactly.. set up a vpn to work, and connect directly to a machine that's left on all the time. it really works very well.

microsoft's remote desktop client for OSX in combination with XP pro is a very good option, i would say even better than using VNC.

google searches for "os x remote desktop microsoft" or "VNC os x" should give interested parties all the info/dl's they need.

[Boondoggle]

Originally posted by mike one:
put your crackpipe down.

i have four analytical instruments in my lab, none of which could be run with a mac. HPLC, GC, liquid handler, uv/vis/flu plate reader.

Well they could be run with a Mac if the vendors wrote the software for them.

I remember a pretty nice Mass Spec. that used a Mac OS (sys 7) 6 or 7 years ago... Perkin Elmer maybe?

There may be others but I'm not in the lab anymore. It is too bad. That instrument was much more user friendly than the HPLC's, Scintillation counters and other gadgets that ran on windows at the time.

bd

[Spliff]

Just saw this posted today. Looks like VPC 7 will sport some major performance increases if this report is accurate:

Demo of VPC 7 - Lionel - 20:52:16

Yesterday in front of resellers and Apple and Microsoft representatives, took place in France the first demo and presentation of Office 2004 and VPC7.
We have collected info concerning VP7.
It was not possible to use VP7, because it is still unstable, but hereafter are some details:
- VPC icon has been modified
- Better support and management of peripherals (especially for USB)
- It will be noticeably faster than the previous version
- It should support dual processor system as well as G5-based computers
And the best for the end...
VPC7 should manage and support natively graphic cards, and that's a huge improvement and particularly good news. In this way, we can expect to be able to play PC games on a Mac, it will probably require a quite fast processor and a good graphic card. For example, DirectX will not be emulated, but directly treated, as on a PC, by the graphic card!!!
Something that we were always missing, but expecting, in the previous VPC version...

Source: http://www.hardmac.com/niouzcontenu....004-05-12#2089

[ginoledesma]

I have an iBook G4/800 with 640MB of RAM, and VPC6 ran a little bit better than my old PowerMac G4/400/1GH RAM. However, its nowhere near what I'd consider comfortably snappy. My office Pentium III-500/128MB PC outperforms it in most of the tasks I do (Lotus Notes, Opera, Java-based apps, etc). Its about on par with Pentium-IIs, I think. MS Office is acceptable, but since I have a copy of Office for the Mac, I'd rather work with that instead.

[BkueKanoodle]

Remote Desktop is the way to go. I spent $450 to build a cheap windows box. (Shuttle Mini ITX athlonXP 2600) I threw Suse Linux on it, running windows XP as a remote desktop host in a Virtual Machine using VMWARE. I also use that machine as a development box, test web server, mail server, file server, and it doesn't even break a sweat. No need for a monitor, just a shiny aluminum cube that matches my powerbook in the corner of my desk.

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by Spliff:
Just saw this posted today. Looks like VPC 7 will sport some major performance increases if this report is accurate:



Source: http://www.hardmac.com/niouzcontenu....004-05-12#2089

Sounds like it may be ideal... I just wish MS would hurry up about it!

I have rigged up my old G4 450 Dualie box to run VPC 6 (Win 2000) in OS 9, and although it struggles, the software is usable.

I am holding off on the new laptop until VPC comes out and I can see how fast it will run, or a G5 notebook comes out... But this seems like good news even if the source is not the most reliable...

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
Are you running OS 9 or OS X? Because I have yet to see any G3 run any version of Windows under Virtual PC in OS X at a useable speed. OS 9 is a different story.

Up until last week when the machine unceremoniously kicked the bucket, I was running VPC 6 on a 900MHz Yosemite G3 (PPC750fx) & OS X 10.3.3. Now, it was no speed demon to be sure, but usable it was. I needed to quickly check to make sure PowerPoint files authored on the Mac would display 100% correctly, and to run the PC version of Novel GroupWise when necessary. All ran at an "acceptable" speed.

This was VPC 6 running Windows 2000 sp2, Office 2000, Novel GroupWise 6.5.1 and the Novel Netware client. 384MB RAM allocated to Windows 2000 and around 5GB of drive space. 1024x768.

The same PC disk image runs substantially faster on my rev. C 12" PowerBook, but none the less it was usable on my G3.

My PC solution for the G5 at home - a cheap AMD box hidden in the basement, WinXP Pro, 50 feet of 100Mbit cat 5e cable, and Microsoft Remote Desktop I doubt I'll buy VPC 7...