Virtual PC 7 and G5 and Ram Disk

[BornAgainMac]

How fast do you think Virtual PC 7 would run on a G5 if you created a 2 GB fixed file partition, installed Win2000 and had a G5 with 4 GBs of Ram? Next create a 2 GB Ram disk and copy the Virtual PC image to a RAM disk and allocated Windows 512 MB of memory.

Once you are done with your Windows session then you just copy the disk image back to disk. It would seem Windows would scream if it was running entirely in RAM. Perhaps still be slow for games because of the video support and CPU emulation but faster than what we have seen with Virtual PC.

 

[Nny]

I am beginning to think Virtual PC 7 is vaporware. We heard only a byline for it in Jaunary and now Office 2004 has gone GM without it. I have not seen a screen shot or heard a news blurb. There is no estimated release date. Is anyone here subscribed to the Mactopia newsletter? Any news on this at all?

 

[MisterMe]

How fast do you think Virtual PC 7 would run on a G5 if you created a 2 GB fixed file partition, installed Win2000 and had a G5 with 4 GBs of Ram? Next create a 2 GB Ram disk and copy the Virtual PC image to a RAM disk and allocated Windows 512 MB of memory.

Once you are done with your Windows session then you just copy the disk image back to disk. It would seem Windows would scream if it was running entirely in RAM. Perhaps still be slow for games because of the video support and CPU emulation but faster than what we have seen with Virtual PC.

Back in the day when hard disks were a lot slower than they are today, I was underwhelmed by the performance of RAM disk. I would expect RAM disk to give the greatest performance boost in data-intensive applications. You might see some minor improvement in performance. However, the performance of VPC will be dominated by the speed at which the emulator engine interprets x86 code. You Mac hard disk system is designed to serve a multitasking, multiuser OS. It will serve data to your x86 applications running on VPC as quickly as they need the data.