Does virtual PC suck?

[Noah]

hey,

Need to know what I'm getting into w/ Virtual PC. I've heard everything from: "It will make a G4 run like a 200mhz PC" too: "It will be slightly slower, but if you've allocated enough ram, it shouldn't be bad..." Quite different answers, you can see why my hesitation.

Is anyone out there using it for something simple like an accounting program? How is it?

I'm running Titainium G4 PowerBook a couple of generations old.

Thanks,

Noah

 

[brap]

It's perfectly usable for all but the most realtime things. Don't expect it to be snappy. Better with lots of memory and a fast hard disc (If you have a 4200rpm it will seem painfully slow when accessing the emuated drives).. pity there's no test drive available - I'd personally test it out by grabbing a copy of a friend's and seeing for yourself. An accounts program, though, should run just fine on Windows NT, 2000 or even 98SE. XP is a waste of time.

 

[yoda13]

Go ahead and use it. It is slow, but usuable. For what you want, no prob. I used it for a stats program called SPSS a year or two ago for a grad research and methods class. I made it through just fine.

 

[kronos2611]

I've been using VPC for a while now - speed wise not great but if you're not doing anything too stressfull it's ok. Hard Drive speed and memory are definately the key points to getting decent performance so get as much memory as possible in your Mac before even considering installing.

As disk access is also quite slow - installing the OS into the Virtual PC can be very very time consuming if you don't buy it with the OS pack. For some reason I've found Linux particularly slow to install and start up in VPC - but once running it's actually not bad.

 

[scottwat]

Not bad

I have used VPC 6 for mostly VB and Access, these were course required, not by choice. I've also had to use a few other apps for programming. If I were you and didn't have to use VPC then I wouldn't. There are probably some accounting software native to OSX that would be alot better than trying to run it in VPC. Basically my recommendation is its ok to use every now and again. But if I had to rely on running software in it on a daily basis I think I would just go and buy a cheap PC.

 

[Mechcozmo]

DO NOT RUN XP.
I have heard good things about win2k and win98. I run XP, and it is only usable by turning off all the crud it runs in the background and more. And even then it is still slow as molasses in January on Pluto.

Buy 6.1 with Windows 2000. You should be ok.

 

[NeoMayhem]

NT 4 with a lot of crap removed is pretty fast on my old g3, it is faster then the last PC that I owned.

 

[scottwat]

DO NOT RUN XP.
I have heard good things about win2k and win98. I run XP, and it is only usable by turning off all the crud it runs in the background and more. And even then it is still slow as molasses in January on Pluto.

Buy 6.1 with Windows 2000. You should be ok.

actually thats not VPC's fault, its XP in general. (Prodaganda time) My grandfather bought a dell with XP, a desktop, and only got 256mb of ram, it was a dog, fine for him but I thought my LC 3 back in the day was much faster than this thing.