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