Virtual PC 6

[tikibangout]

Hi, I'm currently using VPC6, and I have Windows XP Home installed with it. My question is, why doesn't it let me set the RAM higher than 512MB? And also it shows my processor as a Pentium II, and like the speed is 250MHz or so. Its kind of slow and I was wondering if there's anyway to make it go faster.

 

[mad jew]

For the RAM, use less than half your actual RAM. I can't remember the reasoning off the top of my head but it makes it much faster. I think it's because the actual app uses up a lot of RAM and you must still leave some for your actual system so if you assign too much, it's going to start using virtual RAM which is much slower since it has to use the hard drive.

To make VPC faster, turn off the XP eye candy and virtual memory (on the PC) for a start.

 

[TDM21]

The 512mb limit is in VPC itself. This is true for VPC 7 as well. Even if you were running 4 GB of ram in a G5, you could only use 512mb for VPC. The processor speed sounds about right. I ran a program that can monitor real time clock speed and get around 300 MHz on my PB running 2000.

The best option to make XP run faster in VPC is to disable all the eye candy. If you right click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced Tab > Performance Options, you can disable all the graphics effects XP uses. Also disabling services you don't need can increase performance. The site, http://www.blackviper.com/ has a good walkthrough showing what services you need or don't need.