Allocate how much RAM to Virtual PC?

[amin]

Added 1GB 3rd party RAM to my stock 15" PB today, now at 1.5GB total and really digging the performance improvement w/ multiple running apps.

Running XP Pro in VPC now, and wondering how much RAM to allocate to VPC. I've read that no matter how much RAM one has, one should always give VPC only 256MB RAM. Is this still true?

 

[taeclee99]

Added 1GB 3rd party RAM to my stock 15" PB today, now at 1.5GB total and really digging the performance improvement w/ multiple running apps.

Running XP Pro in VPC now, and wondering how much RAM to allocate to VPC. I've read that no matter how much RAM one has, one should always give VPC only 256MB RAM. Is this still true?

Running windows xp runs slow even with 512 megs allocated to it on my g5.
Windows 2000 runs much faster even with only 256 megs in my experience.

 

[jalagl]

I've had a similar experience as the previous post. WinXP on VPC was unusable on my 867Mhz TiBook, but Win2K (specially after doing the tweaking on this article) ran like a charm with 256MB of RAM.

 

[dmw007]

I would think that you should allocate as much RAM as possible to VPC for the best performance (read about this in MacAddict Magazine).

 

[FoxyKaye]

On my iMac, VPC with WinXP and 512MB RAM feels like it's running on an old Pentium II/233.

OTOH, I've also given Win2K 512MB RAM and it actually works pretty well - feels like Win2K on a really fast Pentium I or Pentium II...

Running VPC at all on my old upgraded Blue/White, no matter how much RAM I gave it or what flavor of Windows, was painful.

My advise: If you've gotta run XP, give it the whole megallah of RAM it can take - Unless you're running graphics-intensive programs, then you can also get away with the minimum VRAM setting. If you can run Win2K, anything over 256MB should make performance acceptable.

 

[mad jew]

From memory (excuse the pun ) you shouldn't allocate half your RAM or more to VPC. So if you have 1GB of RAM, VPC should not get 512MB or above. I can't remember the reason but this seems to be about right on my machines.

 

[MisterMe]

Added 1GB 3rd party RAM to my stock 15" PB today, now at 1.5GB total and really digging the performance improvement w/ multiple running apps.

Running XP Pro in VPC now, and wondering how much RAM to allocate to VPC. I've read that no matter how much RAM one has, one should always give VPC only 256MB RAM. Is this still true?

You don't allocate RAM to VPC, you devote emulated RAM within VPC to Windows. There is a major difference. VPC gets its RAM from MacOS X, just as any other MacOS X application. My G5 has 1 GB RAM. It seems to work best with VPC's emulated RAM set to 480 MB. This is consistent with mad jew's earlier post. You want to minimize VPC's requirements for virtual memory. If you allocate too much RAM, you force VPC to use virtual memory. This is counter to your reason for allocating the RAM to Windows in the first place. With 1.5 GB RAM on your PowerBook, I would think you would get fairly good performance with the VPC RAM set to 512 MB.

You can run a series of tests on VPC by using its RAM slider to allocate RAM. Use the setting which gives optimum performance.

 

[louis_sx]

Is virtual PC 7 substantially faster than VPC6.1.1? I'm running that right now and on my 1.25ghz eMac, the only acceptible OS is 98...2000 is tolerable but slow IMO. Probably need to invest in a G5 if I want snappy PC speed. :lol: But anyway, I'm debating upgrading, but if it's not substantially (say 30-50% faster) I'm not going to waste my money and I'll press on with Windows 98 and Office 97.

 

[amin]

Thanks all for the replies. I'm going to experiment and see what works best.

 

[taeclee99]

Is virtual PC 7 substantially faster than VPC6.1.1? I'm running that right now and on my 1.25ghz eMac, the only acceptible OS is 98...2000 is tolerable but slow IMO. Probably need to invest in a G5 if I want snappy PC speed. :lol: But anyway, I'm debating upgrading, but if it's not substantially (say 30-50% faster) I'm not going to waste my money and I'll press on with Windows 98 and Office 97.

To answer your question VPC7 does not offer much of a speed boost on machines with G4 processors over VPC 6. Windows 2000 performance is relatively the same with both versions of VPC on my powerbook g4.
Even on my G5, I would not say that the speed increase is that great.
If you want snappy pc speed, I would suggest getting a cheap $299 machine from DELL instead.

 

[mad jew]

Even on my G5, I would not say that the speed increase is that great.

Umm... VPC pre 7.0 doesn't work on G5s. That was pretty much the largest single update that Microsoft did to the app to warrant the 7.0 tag.

 

[taeclee99]

Umm... VPC pre 7.0 doesn't work on G5s. That was pretty much the largest single update that Microsoft did to the app to warrant the 7.0 tag.

I should have been more clear. I meant that VPC 7 on my G5 does not run faster than VPC 7 does on my g4 powerbook.

 

[mad jew]

I should have been more clear. I meant that VPC 7 on my G5 does not run faster than VPC 7 does on my g4 powerbook.

Sorry. Thanks for clearing that up.