Parallels on my old G5?

need intel

no way around it

theres virtual pc but the performance is so poor its stupid to even try

You only optional is Virtual PC, but that is slow.

I don't think VPC even works on the G5, unless MS did an update to it.

You would need Virtual PC, which is an emulator (it has to translate the Intel instruction set to PPC). It would work, but it would not be a great solution for everyday Office use. If OS-X Entourage worked at all for you, stick with that.

iShater said:

I don't think VPC even works on the G5, unless MS did an update to it.

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Virtual PC does work on the G5 with the latest/last version that was available, but had some issues with OS X 10.5.x - if memory serves, I think it was an issue with the optical drive not working. The work around was to use an ISO disc image instead of the actual optical drive.

I use Virtual PC on my faithful G5 (dual 2.5GHz) and it absolutely crawls - can't even run anything demanding at all, and most things it can run are well below acceptable speed for work use. It's useful for the odd task and opening otherwise useless files to convert but I'd never recommend it as a viable alternative option to an office package running natively on your machine.

If it's just Office go with a proper Mac version (I have Microsoft Office v.X which is ancient but I've yet to need to upgrade enough to do so) or one of the OpenOffice/NeoOffice options, you'll go crazy doing that kind of thing in VPC.

Parallels as mentioned is for Intel machines only. The performance gap between Parallels on an Intel machine and Virtual PC on an old Mac is worlds apart, unfortunately. That doesn't mean that your G5 can't earn its keep using traditional OSX applications though.

At this point I would recommend getting a used-mini, it will probably have more power than that G5

iShater said:

At this point I would recommend getting a used-mini, it will probably have more power than that G5

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It would definitely be more powerful than the G5. Even the original 1.5GHz Core Solo would be faster unless running a legacy PowerPC app.

For the record, all of the Intel chips used in Macs has Intel's VT technologies, meaning the chip itself supports virtualization. Doing it at the chip-level in place of at the software level (as the earliest versions of VMware did) gives modern hypervisor-based systems (including Fusion and Parallels) the speed that we all enjoy.

PowerPC chips did/do not support virtualization at the chip level. And, even if they did, you would be trying to run Windows within the VM which does not run on a PowerPC ISA so you would need emulation/conversation anyway.

VPC crawls. Even my Dual core 2.3 can only muster enough power to emulate performance of a 500mhz PentiumIII. A single 1.6 would be lucky to make equivalent of 300mhz.

Yeah. I have Virtual PC 7.0.1 running on a Quad G5 with 4 GB RAM, and TBO Windows 2000 Pro is the last Windows OS you can run decently.