Virtual PC on iMac G5

My application Virtual PC exists in my applications folder. It's about 36MB in size. This is the program that will let your virtual machine run.

When you install an operating system, it creates one large file that I suppose you could describe as a virtual Hard Drive. The one created for Win XP Professional is about 15Gb in size. This file, on my iMac, resides in my Documents folder.

I installed VPC and WinXP per the instructions, and these are the default locations for the files. I've never had any difficulties with them being where they are (and, I guess, to be honest, I don't know how they'd run if they were on another partition).

I think if you check www.mactopia.com you should be able to find the versions of Windows that VPC is compatable with. I don't recall seeing Win 98 as one of them.

Win XP seems to run about 1/4 speed on my iMac (as compared to a 1Gh PC).

I've read that Win 2000 seems to run fastest on VPC. Might be worth doing a search of all the forums...

Good luck!
Bob

As Bob Gold says, there's no point in creating a partition for virtual PC. It's self-contained once it's installed, and one nice thing about it is that if you have a problem with your virtual PC, you can just throw it out and create a new one.

I have a retail copy of Windows XP home but I am still using it. When you install windows XP does it phone home and find out that the copy is registered with another piece of hardware? In other words, do I need a version of Virtual PC with Windows XP already bundled?

Did I catch you right that a G5 iMac would run at 1/4 the speed of a 1 GHz Pentium? That would be 10x slower than the PC I am replacing! What's the clock speed on your iMac and how much memory?

a j,
I have XP, 2K, 98 and 95 all running as virtual machines.
you were told right, XP is very slow, Win 2K is much better.
98 is about the same as 2K
forget about 95, there's no plug and play and USB is a major headache to set up and troublesome.

Will an OEM version of 98 run?
I dont think it will because isnt that basically a restore cd for that machine?
Not actually a full installation version of 98?

I recommend 2 options for running PC apps.

First and foremost is to keep the PC and access it by using MS Remote Desktop Connection.
Very stable and very fast running across a local gigabit network.

Secondly is VPC with bundled Win 2k.
Another way is VPC without a Windows operating system and ask around if anyone has Win 2K Pro they no longer use (maybe they upgraded to XP) that you can buy for a few bucks.

Richard,

Yep, it's slow. My iMac G5 is running at 1.5Ghz, and I've got 1.25 Gb Ram installed.

The only applications I run are one for my work...it's strictly text. The other one is Spider, to which my wife is addicted.

I don't use my old PC laptop... Has Win 98, and is so buggy that it ends up being slower than VPC on my iMac.

Bob

So is Win 2k Pro faster than Win XP Pro?

Also, are there apps or web technologies that Win 2K Pro might be too outdated for? I've been using XP home in VPC and am trying to get the best performance for a couple specific websites that will only run in Windows that use presentation technologies displaying live powerpoint presentations, sound and feedback via microphone.

-charlene

Win 2000 runs much faster than does Win XP with Virtual PC. I run Virtual PC on my iMac G5 2 GHz with 1.512 GB RAM. Even if I allocate maximal specs (512 MB and 16 VRAM) to it, Virtual PC is slow as a whole. I keep my system folder clean and small, so virtual VC's hard disk images are installed on one of 12 partitions. I initially started using v. 2 of Virtual PC to use a Windows-only scientific program called Gauss, which is created by Aptech.

I've been using Virtual PC since 1999. And these are facts.

Some games including Caesars III and Pharaoh run with Virtual PC 4. Recent games won't run with Virtual PC 6 and 7 because of Virtal PC's inadequency and incompatibility in its virtual video adapter. I couldn't even install Age of Mythology the Titans expansion pack demo on Virtual PC 6. I succeeded in installing Age of Mythology on Virtual PC 7 both with Win 2000 and XP. And Age of Mythology ran, and I could blindly click on the main game screen. But the game screen never came because of the failure in VPC's virtual video adapter. (AOM's minimal VRAM size is 16 MB.)

Win 2000 runs faster than Win XP. But Win 2000 has an audio streaming problem, which Win XP doesn't seem to have under Virtual PC 6. I wanted to listen to live college football games that Yahoo! offers. The audio stream was interrupted and never came back with Win 2000. There was no problem with Win XP. I reinstalled Win 2000 but the situation was the same.

Virtual PC 7 is faster than Vitual PC 6.

You can run almost any Windows program that doesn't require much video RAM. You can even run Adobe Acrobat Pro 7.

Lastly, to my knowledge, Win 98 SE is stable under Virtual PC though Win 98 is not. As long as the system requirement of the program is compatible with Win 98, it should run with Win SE under Virtual PC. There is no vitual difference in OS performance-wise whether you install your own Win OS out of the CD or you have an OS bundled version. The only difference is that it will take one hour longer to install the OS out of the CD.

Y have use virtual PC since 9.2, on an iMac G3, with XP and 2000, as everybody says 2000 runs much better than XP and this beacuse XP has much more grafics than 2000, what I usually do is make to virtual disk, 1 about 3 gigas that contains windows and another dynamic that is used to store all files and some big aplications. So the Virtual hard drive that contains windows are always ok.