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comda

comda

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 15, 2011
619
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Greetings guys!

I cant focus to study today so i pulled out my Emac G4 and next thing i know im installing windows XP home on Virtual PC 7. This Emac is the last model, 2005 1.42Ghz G4, 1Gb RAm, 80GB HDD, combo drive and airport card. Im using it to type this out in TenFourFox.

Anyways, i was able to strip windows XP down, by removing its eye candy and any unnecessary software i didnt need and XP home SP2 with only 256Mb of ram is actually quite snappy. Booting from Virtual PC 7 in under a minute. Its fast until i open the browser. (latest version firefox) Then firefox bogs down, while internet explorer cant even display google's web page. I got into youtube after maybe 10 minute of it loading. So my question, is there anyway to get this VM some speed? im running leopard and like i said the OS in the VM Xp, is actually very snappy. Any suggestions here?
 
Will those machines take any more RAM? Between VPC and TFF I'd bet it's out of memory. You can open activity monitor to see what it's doing. A SSD would speed up swapping, but I think more RAM would show the biggest benefit.
 
flyrod said:
Will those machines take any more RAM? Between VPC and TFF I'd bet it's out of memory. You can open activity monitor to see what it's doing. A SSD would speed up swapping, but I think more RAM would show the biggest benefit.
Click to expand...
These can take 2GB of RAM
 
flyrod said:
Will those machines take any more RAM? Between VPC and TFF I'd bet it's out of memory. You can open activity monitor to see what it's doing. A SSD would speed up swapping, but I think more RAM would show the biggest benefit.
Click to expand...

One of the issues with VPC is the relatively limited amount of RAM it can use.

I ran it for a while on a Quad that had room to spare(I had 10gb in it) and the FF/XP/VPC7 combination was still painfully slow. I had allocated VPC the maximum it was allowed(I think somewhere around 500mb) but the above combo was still pretty much off limits. It only just ran well enough to run the work software I needed it for.

I've since been told that VPC7 will actually work better with less than the maximum amount of RAM allocated, although I've not confirmed that for myself.
 
There's a sweet spot for the amount of ram to allocate a PC inside VPC and it's not the full amount. It's about 384mb or so.

Adjust XP for best performance, not for apps. And turn off any hard drive shadow copies and stuff like that.

Make sure you set the PC to share your internet connection, not get it's own IP. Regardless however, browsers inside VPC will be slow. Because they are sharing your internet connection either way.
 
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You have to remember that at best VPC is performing like a 300Mhz Pentium, so it will struggle with modern software and the web.
I've used VPC lots and Windows 2000 is the best OS for a compromise between practicality and speed - if you want performance and use retro apps, Windows 95/98 are best.
 
Hazard with VirtualPC 6.2/7 is anything past 384MB really goes towards Intel to PPC emulation translation/emulation code layer cache(did some testing which proved this), if you plan to run something wild like Corel PaintShopPro X2/X3 it'll make a huge difference in that area but nothing else. From my testing VPC 6.2/7 supports some Pentium III instruction sets, its a crapshot from program to program or version to version.

If you want to run the newest software within VirtualPC, there are Pentium/Pentium II builds of PuppyLinux, Slitaz & CoreLinux to allow running the newest versions of Firefox, Libre Office, etc.
 
MacCubed said:
These can take 2GB of RAM
Click to expand...
yeah i know. Right now i have no idea which machine has my 1gig sticks. Like i said the OS XP is snappy as hell.
eyoungren said:
There's a sweet spot for the amount of ram to allocate a PC inside VPC and it's not the full amount. It's about 384mb or so.

Adjust XP for best performance, not for apps. And turn off any hard drive shadow copies and stuff like that.

Make sure you set the PC to share your internet connection, not get it's own IP. Regardless however, browsers inside VPC will be slow. Because they are sharing your internet connection either way.
Click to expand...

I have adjusted XP for performance, ive turned off low power setttings and the OS itself is fast. It surprised me. When i gave it 512mb it did slow down. Back to 256 it sped back up. Maybe ill try 384. I'm not sure what you mean by hard drive shaddows though.
jbarley said:
I was actually referring to his mention of trying "internet exploder".
Click to expand...

Yes, I mentioned explorer, but i am using the latest version of Firefox available. And its slow as hell.
 
Dronecatcher said:
You have to remember that at best VPC is performing like a 300Mhz Pentium, so it will struggle with modern software and the web.
I've used VPC lots and Windows 2000 is the best OS for a compromise between practicality and speed - if you want performance and use retro apps, Windows 95/98 are best.
Click to expand...

yeah i know. The G3 can run windows 98 just fine. I currently have windows XP SP2 pro installed on an Old IBM 390X. This machine is really low on the performance charts, with only a Pentium 3 500Mhz, 192Mb Ram and a newer 40GB hard drive. But it flies even with the visuals. So i figured id try it here. And as ive mentioned the OS itself is pretty fast im surprised. Its faster then my Macbook Pro 5,5 booting up and operating at times. Just the web browser is what im stumped on.
 
Altemose said:
If web browsing is the desired usage for the virtual machine, I would recommend looking at OS X alternatives.
Click to expand...
web browsing isnt the only reason i am trying this. I like the fact that XP can still run a lot of the modern mainstream software out there like the latest versions of Teamviewer, firefox as well as id like having office 2007 in XP and other smaller applets.
 
comda said:
web browsing isnt the only reason i am trying this. I like the fact that XP can still run a lot of the modern mainstream software out there like the latest versions of Teamviewer, firefox as well as id like having office 2007 in XP and other smaller applets.
Click to expand...
I get your reasoning. Just understand that because of the way things are, on 2GB or less systems you're pushing it to have both VPC and other apps running concurrently.

When I was using VPC on my G5 it wasn't too bad of an issue because that system had 4GB ram. Later model G5s with even more ram should do better. But on 2GB or less systems most of the available ram is being taken to feed VPC.

My point is that unless you have something specific to be doing this is not something you want hanging around in the background (even with suspending as an option) for the occasional access.

Just informing is all, nothing more.
 
comda said:
web browsing isnt the only reason i am trying this. I like the fact that XP can still run a lot of the modern mainstream software out there like the latest versions of Teamviewer, firefox as well as id like having office 2007 in XP and other smaller applets.
Click to expand...

To be honest with you, you are going to be better off using older OS X software than bickering with XP in VPC simply due to the performance factor.
 
comda said:
I'm not sure what you mean by hard drive shaddows though.
Click to expand...
Most versions of Windows from XP SP2 and up utilize the Volume Shadow Copy service. VSS is essentially your restore points.

In the background while you work your HD is busy shadow copying files periodically to wherever it stores them so that if at some point you decide you want to restore - a full copy of the OS and it's files are ready to go.

Think about the hit you are taking with VSS being on and running in the background of your virtual machine. For me, VSS is not worth it. If I have something critical that I need to ensure that my VM doesn't go south then I just used a dedicated PC for that. Since VPC virtual machines are essentially disk images it's easy to just back them up periodically and replace them from backup if necessary.

If you want to turn it off, here's the instructions (I stole them from a post at tomshardware):

Right-click "My Computer" go to:
Manage>Services and Applications>Services>Volume Shadow Copy> and Right-Click,
Select Properties, In the box labeled "Startup Type" select "Disabled" Click Ok, you are done.
 
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