Virtual PC on PM G5 Quad?

VPC 7 should run on the Quad but it won't be fast since VPC isn't MP aware.

Neither will it use the 3D hardware acceleration for any Windows apps.

Jason -

You don't say whether you already have VPC 7 or not, so I'm guessing you do not. I would recommend getting VPC 7 XP Pro, and then disabling a number of its features so that the system runs more quickly. There have been discussions on how to do this. If you will do a VPC 7 search in the Discussions, you should be able to find several reports from G5 users.

Running VPC 7 (XP Pro) on my 1.5GHz 15" PB is quite tolerable, and I've read in these discussions of others who have even better experience with VPC 7 on their G5s. When I say tolerable, I mean that it does run slower than on a Win machine, but the tasks I use it for are fast enough to be usable. My use is limited to running some Windows database programs that are not available for the Mac. I even run my Palm programs from within VPC 7, as I prefer the Windows version over the Palm Mac version.

Jason -

Sorry for my mistake. I have also purchased other versions of VPC, always abandoning them because none have run fast enough to be really very useful to me. VPC 7 is the first one I have continued using.

It is my understanding none of the VPCs have been optimized for dual processors, individual or dual core. I base this on comments others have made in Discussions, and on the VPC website info. That it hasn't been, IMO, is a pitty. I would suspect MS, now the owner of VPC, does not want it to run much faster than it already does.

Jason -

Whoops! Mistake again. On re-reading your post, I realize you were asking whether VPC 7 would even run on a dual core G5. I would have to assume so, as I know it runs fine on dual processor G5s, it's just that VPC 7 doesn't utilize both processors. If this doesn't get it right, I'll leave you alone.

I am currently using VPC 7.0.2 on my dual core 2.3. So far I have had to do three installs of windows XP. Each time, after an apparently succesful install, rebooting would result in various errors. One was a missing hal.dll error, the last was an IO error. As usual, the windows recovery console was of no use. I have tried formatting with FAT32 and NTFS. My last attempt was with FAT32 and so far the install seems normal. I have not noticed much of a speed increase between running VPC on my dual core PowerMac over my PowerBook 1.67

Hi there,

I have a "Quad" on order and would like to know if
VPC 7 will run on it. Any experiences with VPC 7 on
DualCore G5s?

Jason

Hi Jason,
Well I haven't received my Quad yet so I can't exactly tell you if it'll run faster or slower. I did test out Virtual PC on a Dual Core 2.3 and I did see some performance boost compared to my Dual 2.7. I did tweak the system setting a a bit. Try them out and hopefully you can find it to be a bit faster for you. Ok.. so only allocate 128MB of ram to Virtual PC... I know it's weird and doesn't really make any sense but this is why... When Windows boots up it determines the amount of physical RAM it has. When there is more than 256MB of physical RAM it changes it's paging scheme as well as some of the caching optimizations to take advantage of the larger physical ram.
These optimizations don't play well with Virtual PC, because the physical RAM it thinks there is actual virtual. Because the fundamental performance bottleneck is paging memory between your Macintosh and the Windows Guest, the more memory Windows thinks it has the more it asks for. If you say you have 512MB of physical ram Windows XP will ask for a block of about 192MB of ram to use. Virtual PC then allocates that 192MB of ram and pages it in. This immediately gobbles up loads of memory and causes stress on your Mac and Virtual PC. If you set the ram to 128MB you don't see this happen.

Another tweak I made was I set the vram to max and I also changed my Windows XP theme to classic. It runs a lot smoother. Even though I run nothing really intensive it makes the overall system more stable and at least I feel I have less lag.

Let me know us know what happens!

-netinvader

I have run VPC 7.0.x (latest upgrade) on my DC 2.0/2.5GB RAM.
It runs noticably faster than on my previous system (Sawtooth 400 w/ OWC 1.4GHz upgrade/768MB RAM).
AutoCAD 2002 under Win2k, which was a drag on the old machine, is now quite tolerable and very adequate to work with. You still can't allocate more than 512 MB of memory to VPC, so I am staying away from XP until this is fixed.

Here is a direct answer to your question. Yes. It seems to run just fine. It's at least as fast as my wife's 1.2 ghz Celeron powered Compaq. I just installed Printshop for her and it works just fine. Hope that's helpful

Just to note VPC 7 is much faster than VPC 6 (but is still slower than a real PC).

iFelix

The extra core usage is probably OSX and other Mac software using those cores. MacFeats had a short blurb on running VPC on a dual-core G5 and said that their processor usage never got above 99% of the 400% available.