asencif said:
Were you successful? I have the latest unstable UB Q running on a PPC DP 2.0 G5 with XPSP2 installed and it's very slow. It identifies the system as a 33MHZ P2 which is awful. Others have said it should be a 1ghz at least and faster than VPC7. Is this true? Maybe I should try a different build or any settings need to be changed?
I did get Q running on my MacBook Pro, and was able to install a XP Pro SP2 from CD. However, I could not get it to work directly from a CD - there were a strange set of errors that XP install reported in the copying from CD. I truly at this point don't know if it was how XP install was driving my optical drive, or if there's a problem with the drive itself on my MacBook, but I spent several frustrated hours until I finally imaged the XP Pro CD, and pointed the "boot from CD" to that disk image. Note that I had to rename the .dmg file to .img to make it work - not clear why the distinction is necessary, but it is.
Anyway, I set up a 384MB Q Guest, and booted from the CD image - Windows took over, and roughly 2 hours later, I had a functioning XP that reliabily boots. What was really cool is that I was working on other Mac apps throughout the install process - turning on the processor monitor (that shows both CPUs activity levels) showed that the Q/XP installer was red-lining one CPU, while the other was free to run my other apps - I was expecting slower performance in background (when it's window is covered), but the SMP of OS-X works brilliantly to keep everything running fast. I can now start some long process (downloads, processing, etc. in Q, and not have it affect my Mac applications seemingly a bit!
Interestingly enough, to your comment above (about the report of Pentium 2 performance at 33Mhz), I'm getting the System Control Panel in XP to report the equivalent of 759Mhz Pentium 2. However, I don't take much stock in that - It seems to shift the number a bit, apparently depending on what's going on when it does the test. However, I do find that the performance is 2 to 3X what it was on my Powerbook 17" (1Ghz) running Virtual PC. In fact, as I'm writing this, iTunes and Quicktime 7 for Windows is downloading and installing in background (running at full download speed on my DSL).
One note of importance - be sure to put the XP drivers for Q into a small disk image and specify that image as one of the disks mounted in the Q virtual machine - first thing you need to do is execute the driver installer - in addition to setting up some drivers, it also apparently installs a small program that runs at XP boot time that sets the networking up - pointing to a fixed IP address 10.0.0.4, if I remember, that connects the PC being emulated with the Mac's Internet connection. Note that if you do it this way, you don't have to mess with any XP networking setup - the regular "use a LAN" option that is the default setting works fine.
