Virtual PC

[johng723]

Hi, I was wondering how virtual pc actually works. Does this mean that I can use any PC program on the mac? How do I know if the required specs for the Pc that it says on the box will work on my mac?

[Horrortaxi]

VPC emulates the PC hardware, which allows you to install a PC operating system. The OS install itself is just an image file as far as the Mac is concerned. That's kind of neat. You can allocate however much RAM you want when you set it up, but your processor speed will vary from Mac to Mac. Currently, the best it gets is still pretty slow. On my dual 1 gig G4 VPC will emulate a Pentium 2 at 666mhz. That's just about the fastest you'll get out of it as it does not yet work on G5s.

Will it run all Windows programs? Sure. Will it run them well? Not usually. Forget about games. Then realize that anything that requires a lot of computing power (things like Photoshop) will be painful to use. We browsers and stuff like that are pretty reasonable to use--but if that's all you needed you wouldn't need VPC. It's a last resort.