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How does Microsoft Virtual PC - 7.0.1 work?

joey4127 said:
Do I need to install a version of Windows on to it or what?

Thanks
Click to expand...

All Virtual PC does is simulate the x86 processor architecture on the PPC based chip in your Macintosh.

You can buy VPC bundled with a copy of 2000 or XP or whatever, but you will need to install Windows on top of it.
 
stoid said:
All Virtual PC does is simulate the x86 processor architecture on the PPC based chip in your Macintosh.

You can buy VPC bundled with a copy of 2000 or XP or whatever, but you will need to install Windows on top of it.
Click to expand...


On version Tracker it's $130...What does that come with? I already have a copy of XP from my other PC.
 
I'm pretty sure that VPC will work with standard XP discs though keep in mind that you will still have to go through activation.
 
I bought Virtual PC 7 through my school yesterday (got a good discount), and installed it last night. I bought the version that doesn't come with Windows, and installed Windows 2000, which I had lying around from an old PC. Anyway, the installation was very straightforward. Just install VPC, start it up and insert the Windows installation disc. Then reboot the virtual PC so that it boots from the disk and follow the standard Windows installation procedure. No trouble to get it working at all.

I had worried about performance based on things I had read in these forums, but I find the performance very good on my 1.33 GHz 12" Powerbook. I'm using it to run PSpice and the Xilinx Verilog IDE (electrical engineering software), as well as to check web pages I design in Windows. It's obviously not as fast as a real PC, but the performance is perfectly acceptable.
 
stoid said:
All Virtual PC does is simulate the x86 processor architecture on the PPC based chip in your Macintosh.

You can buy VPC bundled with a copy of 2000 or XP or whatever, but you will need to install Windows on top of it.
Click to expand...
VPC emulates the whole computer and not just the processor. That's why it's called Virtual PC and not Virtual x86.
 
What are any good free alrernitives? Say I have 1 simple program that is extremly light/uses low resources... but its only avilable for windows. is their a free basic alternative than paying for Virtual PC. Or atleast a cheaper sub 50$ one?
 
I have VPC 7.0.1 on my 15'' Powerbook that I use at work. My 15'' PB is a 1.5ghz G4 with 1gig of ram. Windows 2000 runs very slow. It works, but its extremely slow. Installing Windows took forever. Virtual PC is much faster on my PC but then again it doesn't have to do any processor emulation.
 
iBunny said:
What are any good free alrernitives? Say I have 1 simple program that is extremly light/uses low resources... but its only avilable for windows. is their a free basic alternative than paying for Virtual PC. Or atleast a cheaper sub 50$ one?
Click to expand...
There are two major open source x86 emulators. One is Bochs. There are versions for both MacOS 9 and MacOS X. It is slow and just takes a wee bit of work to set up. The second is QEMU. It is the emulation engine in the Darwine project, iEmulator, and other x86-emulators. However, you are not going to find a MacOS X emulator whose performance that even comes close to Virtual PC.
 
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