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Lancetx

macrumors 68000
Aug 11, 2003
1,991
619
Hatmac said:
Just got VPC / XP Pro today from MacMall. Installed it on my Dual G5 2gig.
List the processor as 533 Mhz with 512m of ram and 16m of video ram.
Installed Visio 2000 and Office 2000 so far. No games yet.
Visio worked as well as it does on my wifes new Dull laptop from her office.
I can't out type MS Word. did'nt try Excel or Powerpoint. I am going to try
autocad 2000 as soon as I can get a copy from work and will report how it seems to work.

If you have to run Windows only software and have a G5. I would think this is an acceptable solution.

Bill

Thanks, that's good to hear. Keep us posted on how it goes under further use.
 

Hatmac

macrumors newbie
Jun 23, 2003
6
0
Tampa, Florida
VPC 7 / XP Pro retail edition Info

Lancetx said:
Thanks, that's good to hear. Keep us posted on how it goes under further use.

I loaded Windows 2000 and installed Visio and it seems to run a little bit smoother. However, while I can print to my printer attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station in XP, I get a print error in 2000. The last version of VPC I have is 5. With a G5 I never bought 6.

Any ideas would be extremely helpful

FYI: When loading XP and 2000, XP takes over 2 minutes to boot and 2000 take about 1 minute

PS Visio works fine on both systems with my G5

Bill
 

jaromski

macrumors regular
Jun 18, 2004
150
0
zion
Hatmac said:
Just got VPC / XP Pro today from MacMall. Installed it on my Dual G5 2gig.

I am going to try autocad 2000 as soon as I can get a copy from work and will report how it seems to work.

Bill


I am very interested to hear your results with AutoCAD. I have been trying to figure how I can migrate my whole operation to Mac, but I use AutoCAD 6+ hrs. a day so I have been stuck on PC.

Thanks,

JaromSKI
 

Hatmac

macrumors newbie
Jun 23, 2003
6
0
Tampa, Florida
AutoCad Installed

jaromski said:
I am very interested to hear your results with AutoCAD. I have been trying to figure how I can migrate my whole operation to Mac, but I use AutoCAD 6+ hrs. a day so I have been stuck on PC.

Thanks,

JaromSKI

Installed AutoCad 2000 Lite yesterday and it runs very well on VPC in XP Pro. Very usable. On a regular full size drawing, I was able to zoom and pan smoothly and add / move components easlly. My friend sent me a complex drawing because he said it choked his PC and while it taxed my machine it seems to work better than his PC. ( He could not tell me what his PC ran at but it is an older machine )
I think it runs just like it would on a 533mhz PC with 512m of ram.

Bill

Where you could run into problems is with your plotter. I don't need to print anything. I just e-mail drawings back to my office to print them.
 

jsfpa

macrumors regular
Oct 26, 2003
215
41
sound output with VPC7

I've installed VPC7 on my 1.8 single proc G5with 2 gig of memory. I'm happy with the over all performance but the sound is choppy and distorted. I was wondering if anybody else is having the same probelm? :rolleyes:

Thanks,
John
 

Hatmac

macrumors newbie
Jun 23, 2003
6
0
Tampa, Florida
AutoCad with XP Pro or Windows 2000 Pro

I loaded AutoCad LT on my Windows 2000 Pro partition and you can tell the difference in speed. Windows 2000 is faster.

Bill

By the way John. I have the same sound issue on my Dual 2gig G5.
I also had the issue in VPC 5 on a Dual 1gig G4. Never had VPC 6

New:
John
When I use Windows 2000 Pro the sound seems to be OK. XP uses the latest version of Windows Media Player and my copy of Windows 2000 has an older application. And I'm not going on the internet with any MS OS and take a chance of flooding my Mac with all kinds of nasties. Even if they will only infest VPC
 

meta-ghost

macrumors regular
Apr 9, 2002
230
0
San Francisco
Hatmac said:
Installed AutoCad 2000 Lite yesterday and it runs very well on VPC in XP Pro. Very usable. On a regular full size drawing, I was able to zoom and pan smoothly and add / move components easlly.

it could do this reasonably well with vpc 6. the question i have is how well does it handle large x-ref drawings. any idea?
 

solin

macrumors newbie
Sep 30, 2004
1
0
3D Max

I need your help, please.
All I want to know is if I can run 3D Max with VPC 7.
And how it works.

Thanks for your help.
 

Hatmac

macrumors newbie
Jun 23, 2003
6
0
Tampa, Florida
X-REF

meta-ghost said:
it could do this reasonably well with vpc 6. the question i have is how well does it handle large x-ref drawings. any idea?

Sorry meta-ghost, I'm a LAN design engineer and project manager. I just use AutoCad drawn by others and modify them to create as-builts. I would assume you mean to use in a group. If a 533mhz PC will work a I don't see why you could not create and use X-ref files. Maybe someone else can answer that for you.
Bill
 

gMacMan

macrumors newbie
Oct 2, 2004
3
0
2GB Max for VPC 7, speed good though ;-)

I received my Virtual PC 7 yesterday and promptly installed it on my 1st gen dual 2GHz G5. It locked up my system over and over every time I tried to launch it. Hard lock-ups, at that, kernel panic greyed out screen. I figured it was because I originally installed VPC 6 1 year ago, not knowing it wouldn't work. So I scoured my system getting it all completely uninstalled. Then re-installed VPC 7 and it still crashed, but didn't lock up the system. Eventually it started working, but not reliably. At that point, I had already a call in to MS, which was inundated with calls about VPC 7. They called me back about an hour later and said, "How much memory do you have in your system?" I HAD 2.5GB. MS said they have an issue with machines over 2GB, so I yanked out 512MB and it's been fine since. Pretty speedy, but no SMP support. Since it's emulating a single CPU system, it won't try executing any instructions in parallel. I'd love to see how fast it'd run if it emulated a dual CPU system. I am bummed they didn't include the native graphics card support, but overall, I'm happy. One other note, full screen mode on multi display systems seems to have an issue when the app loses focus off to another display. The VPC hangs when it regains focus until you resize or it loses focus again and focus returns.
 

Kingsfoil13

macrumors newbie
Nov 6, 2003
26
0
Troy, NY
working with 2.5 GB?

In the thread linked above, I have documented many troubles -- but also, at last, what seems to be a working VPC 7 in conjunction with 2.5 GB of RAM. The key seems to be a clean install in a clean, brand-new user account.

Who knows?
 

meta-ghost

macrumors regular
Apr 9, 2002
230
0
San Francisco
gMacMan said:
Since it's emulating a single CPU system, it won't try executing any instructions in parallel. I'd love to see how fast it'd run if it emulated a dual CPU system.

exuse my ignorance but it's only working on one of the cpu's?
 

Kingsfoil13

macrumors newbie
Nov 6, 2003
26
0
Troy, NY
gMacMan said:
... One other note, full screen mode on multi display systems seems to have an issue when the app loses focus off to another display. The VPC hangs when it regains focus until you resize or it loses focus again and focus returns.

Since I have it on another user account, I tend to use fast user switching a LOT, so I am switching back into my VPC account often. When I do this, VPC usually has focus, because I was using it when I left -- but it is frozen (visually), though receiving input (sometimes), until i click off of it to the Finder (or something else) and then come back.

I'm running a dual-monitor system, so I am probably inciting all possible trouble - many third-party apps, more than 2GB RAM, dual monitors...

Still, all of these are things which should have been forseen by MS. Probably a very high percentage of G5 users -- THE market for VPC 7 -- have multiple monitors and over 2.5 GB of RAM.
 

gMacMan

macrumors newbie
Oct 2, 2004
3
0
It emulates 1 CPU, but the workload is spread across both G5 CPU's

meta-ghost said:
exuse my ignorance but it's only working on one of the cpu's?


Let me explain this. 1 CPU is being emulated... Every CPU has a set of instructions. Lets say, in a Pentium, you have an add, a multiply, a divide, and a subtract instruction. If the Windows OS/Application is SMP aware and could ask for simultaneous "add" instructions for more optimal performance, it would do so on an SMP machine. Since the emulated PC is a UP machine, it will not use SMP optimizations. You will see that when instructions reach the OS X level, work will be divided amongst the available CPU's. But you'll see that each CPU will be utilitized only 50% (or 1/(num cpus) * 100) becasuse the guest OS is not aware that multiple "add" or "multiply" or any other instructions CAN be executed in parrallel. Because guest OS will not be SMP optimized, so those 2 "add" instructions will be performed in succession because that is how the guest OS is requesting them, rather than in parallel. What this means is, if you were to be running only virtual pc, and no other apps, you will get nearly the same performance on a single CPU G5 system as on a dual. The only difference is the overhead and background processes running under the covers which will steal a little CPU time. Go ahead, and try it out. Install the CHUD developers tools and disable your 2nd CPU, you'll see that VPC runs at nearly identical speed if it's the only app running on the system .

- G
 

wdlove

macrumors P6
Oct 20, 2002
16,568
0
Gee, I wonder why my VPC 7 upgrade directly from Microsoft hasn't arrived yet? They already sent me the Office 2004 CD.
 

Lancetx

macrumors 68000
Aug 11, 2003
1,991
619
wdlove said:
Gee, I wonder why my VPC 7 upgrade directly from Microsoft hasn't arrived yet? They already sent me the Office 2004 CD.

The VPC 7 Upgrades aren't shipping till November. For some silly reason, MS decided to only ship VPC 7 w/XP Pro and Office 2004 Pro (which includes VPC 7 and XP Pro) for now. :rolleyes:
 

meta-ghost

macrumors regular
Apr 9, 2002
230
0
San Francisco
Lancetx said:
The VPC 7 Upgrades aren't shipping till November. For some silly reason, MS decided to only ship VPC 7 w/XP Pro and Office 2004 Pro (which includes VPC 7 and XP Pro) for now. :rolleyes:

i called macwarehouse about the upgrade version and they said something like oct.4 (or 8?) for shipping.
 

Kingsfoil13

macrumors newbie
Nov 6, 2003
26
0
Troy, NY
Windows Firewall

Now for the latest and greatest (or something: )

Today, I found myself unable to access my machine by ftp, sftp, or ssh - all ways I ordinarily can in different needs. (I know, bad me, bad unsecure ftp.) I went into System Prefs, to see if sharing had somehow been turned off, and instead got an error that I had other firewall software running on the computer. On a hunch, I checked - and it turned out the VPC running XP had come with Service Pack 2 preinstalled - and Windows Firewall was turned on by defualt. It had overruled any settings made in OS X, and suddenly all ports were blocked.

As usual, microsoft thinks it knows better than you what you want.
 

SiliconAddict

macrumors 603
Jun 19, 2003
5,889
0
Chicago, IL
Kingsfoil13 said:
As usual, microsoft thinks it knows better than you what you want.

No offense to anyone here but the average user is a dumb***. MS locked down the ports because the average user isn't smart enough to run Windows update.

Example. MS blaster. You know that wonderful worm that came out last september and caused a major headache for every Window user on the net? Last Tuesday I ran across a user who still haven't patched their system. Never mind the patch has been out since July of '03 (Yah you heard right the patch for blaster was out a solid 2 months before the worm came out.) After I literally slapped him upside the head (Sorry even if you are a friend you will get that reaction.) I cleaned his system and applied the patch.

User's treat their computer like a VCR when in most cases its like a car that DOES need some attention from time to time. (In the case of Windows A LOT of attention.)

VPC is invariably tied to the NIC on the Mac in some way or another. Are you really all that suprised that it might be tied that close to the NIC?!!?
I'd personally perfer they get overly anal with security then what they've done in the past. If you don't like it then disable the firewall and take your chances. Since you are running MOS with VPC its not as big of a deal for you but again don't fault MS for actually securing their OS for once.
 

Kingsfoil13

macrumors newbie
Nov 6, 2003
26
0
Troy, NY
SiliconAddict said:
I'd personally perfer they get overly anal with security then what they've done in the past.

Point taken. Overriding the OS X firewall settings is still annoying, though, especially with no notification. If I was 'the average dumb user' it could have taken me quite a while to figure out what 'other third-party firewall software' I was running that made it so I couldn't use SysPrefs.
 

Lancetx

macrumors 68000
Aug 11, 2003
1,991
619
meta-ghost said:
i called macwarehouse about the upgrade version and they said something like oct.4 (or 8?) for shipping.

I hope you're right, but last word from MS is that it wouldn't be until November.
 

wdlove

macrumors P6
Oct 20, 2002
16,568
0
Lancetx said:
The VPC 7 Upgrades aren't shipping till November. For some silly reason, MS decided to only ship VPC 7 w/XP Pro and Office 2004 Pro (which includes VPC 7 and XP Pro) for now. :rolleyes:

Thank, I will just have to be patient. At least it's only another month.
 

madrobby

macrumors regular
May 3, 2003
115
6
Daham
After toying around a while: Windows 98 definitely is/feels faster, even considering VPC7 screams about not supporting it. The VPC Additions installed, but without the new printer support.

The Original Doom runs smoothly inside VPC on my 1 GHz G4 TiBook (64MB of memory for Windows 98). Didn't before with 6.1 (was rather jerky).

Also, handling OS X with VPC in the background (but active) seems better/more smoothly now.

I guess the 10% to 30% figure is quite right. Can't wait to try this on a G5...

Next: Cinebench 2003, wish me luck... :cool:
 

madrobby

macrumors regular
May 3, 2003
115
6
Daham
madrobby said:
Next: Cinebench 2003, wish me luck... :cool:

No luck for me. CINEBENCH 2003 does all the tests, but all the GFX are wrong, and I get impossible results (like CPU rendering 1792 CB-CPU...).
 
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