Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Virtual PC 7 Now Shipping
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
broken_keyboard said:
That's a first.
I bet Connectix would have finished it faster (arguably better too)...
I would "test" it first before buying... I can't say M$ is advertizing VPC's speed. No mentioning of hardware grfx support as was rumored.
It'll run OK on a Dual G5, sure. But probably mainly 'cause of the speed of the G5, and being able to use more memory.
We'll see.
I will probably get the upgrade version once it becomes available and I have an extra $100 lying around [doubtful any time soon]. But if I get a G5 I guess I'll have to.
Maybe it is just me, but after installing SP2 on the version of XP Pro running in VPC6, the windows apps seem to really be running faster [nothing too processor intensive but at least things like IE doesn't take forever to fire up and open to the google homepage].
Maybe it is just me, but after installing SP2 on the version of XP Pro running in VPC6, the windows apps seem to really be running faster [nothing too processor intensive but at least things like IE doesn't take forever to fire up and open to the google homepage].
sidenote:
It'll be interesting to see if someone could compare VPC 6 and 7 with the same guest OS, runing on the same (Dual) G4?
If I get hold of a copy (something about a sour cable?), I'll happily test it on a Dual 1.25 GHz G4 (FW 800) 1.5 GB RAM.
It'll be interesting to see if someone could compare VPC 6 and 7 with the same guest OS, runing on the same (Dual) G4?
If I get hold of a copy (something about a sour cable?), I'll happily test it on a Dual 1.25 GHz G4 (FW 800) 1.5 GB RAM.
Virtual PC is a must for us web developers
i had used vpc 6 on a ibook 800mhz 12 inch with 640mb ram and it ran slow, to slow to bare
as said above, hopefully the g5's dual processors can kick things up a bit
but in regards to why you would use vpc... me and my partner dev our website together, usually sitting next to each other
thats 2 laptops and a g5 so far. now put a pc with windows 2000, a pc with windows xp, both for testing in different variants of IE and ul see the use for vpc 7 on our g5
our table is a good 14 feet long and every square foot of it is taken up with something, layouts, pcs, etc...
not saying i like windows, if we could, we would dev for FireFox, Safari and othe mozilla's and ignore IE, but corporate america (our target audience) begs to differ.
-Mario
i had used vpc 6 on a ibook 800mhz 12 inch with 640mb ram and it ran slow, to slow to bare
as said above, hopefully the g5's dual processors can kick things up a bit
but in regards to why you would use vpc... me and my partner dev our website together, usually sitting next to each other
thats 2 laptops and a g5 so far. now put a pc with windows 2000, a pc with windows xp, both for testing in different variants of IE and ul see the use for vpc 7 on our g5
our table is a good 14 feet long and every square foot of it is taken up with something, layouts, pcs, etc...
not saying i like windows, if we could, we would dev for FireFox, Safari and othe mozilla's and ignore IE, but corporate america (our target audience) begs to differ.
-Mario
Man, it's about freaking time... I've had my G5 a whole year and no virtual PC... that's pretty rough for a switcher.
Good time to come out with it now that the iMac G5 is out...
Good time to come out with it now that the iMac G5 is out...
No I don't work for Microsoft, I just have to support it
It was rumored to have been RTM'd or set for announcement. This was official confirmation.
It didn't take a full year to get G5 support, although that was a major engineering issue. The CPU geeks can explain it better (no offense intended), but the instruction set of the G5 did not support a mode ("little-endian", whatever that is) that VPC had depended on to do emulation. They got that figured out, but I have to wonder a)how much extra overhead was needed to account for that, b) if the code adjusts for the type of processor in the machine, and c) if G4s are going to be left behind by this update.
Then the release was then pushed back even further each time XP SP2 was delayed. I expected that this announcement would come close on the heels of the release of SP2 via Windows Update. They have probably had the boxes ready to go for some time now. I guess they wanted to ship the most expensive package first.
I only need the upgrade package, which will be shipping later, because I already have the licenses and disk images I need to do my work. They could have made the upgrade available a long time ago.
For anyone considering this, pack your machine with as much memory as you can afford. And definitely, don't expect to do gaming.
It was rumored to have been RTM'd or set for announcement. This was official confirmation.
It didn't take a full year to get G5 support, although that was a major engineering issue. The CPU geeks can explain it better (no offense intended), but the instruction set of the G5 did not support a mode ("little-endian", whatever that is) that VPC had depended on to do emulation. They got that figured out, but I have to wonder a)how much extra overhead was needed to account for that, b) if the code adjusts for the type of processor in the machine, and c) if G4s are going to be left behind by this update.
Then the release was then pushed back even further each time XP SP2 was delayed. I expected that this announcement would come close on the heels of the release of SP2 via Windows Update. They have probably had the boxes ready to go for some time now. I guess they wanted to ship the most expensive package first.
I only need the upgrade package, which will be shipping later, because I already have the licenses and disk images I need to do my work. They could have made the upgrade available a long time ago.
For anyone considering this, pack your machine with as much memory as you can afford. And definitely, don't expect to do gaming.
Mr. Softie VPC demo page says it's 10-30% faster than prior versions. And graphics are faster/better.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=vpcdemo
Go see the flashy demo: It rivals anything pixar had done, or ever will do.....NOT
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=vpcdemo
Go see the flashy demo: It rivals anything pixar had done, or ever will do.....NOT
dogcowx said:Supports more than 512MB now?
Please tell me its so!
No, it still only supports 512 MB. Some changes I've noticed are better printing support, it's faster
, and you can import your images from VPC 6. I haven't had much time to fiddle around with it yet, so I can't get into any more detail at the moment.
That's all they're shipping now. According to the MS "how to buy" page, there will be several retail packages:vniow said:Boo! XP Pro included only! Boooo!!!
- With WinXP Pro for $250
- With WinXP Home for $220
- With Win2K Pro for $250
- Without any Windows (bring your own OS license) for $130
- Upgrade from VPC 5 or later for $100
Right now, only the XP Pro edition is shipping, but they're taking pre-orders for the rest. So if you want to run something else, just wait a little longer.
sparky76 said:
Ok, you got at least one laugh out of this.
Although I'm a stickies person (the tangible kind) and I'll cover that whitespace in no time with useless clutter!
Nermal said:No, it still only supports 512 MB. Some changes I've noticed are better printing support, it's faster
Do you think it's fast enough to play an old (say '95) 2d game?
GetSome681 said:
Version 6 was fast enough to play 2D games so I'd expect 7 to be able to handle them too
The newest game I could run on 6 was Final Fantasy VII, which I think is from 1998. I'll need to try it again under VPC 7 once I get a chance.
Billy_ca said:
Because the G5 does not support the 'pseudo-little-endian' mode that the G3 and G4 chips did. PPC chips are 'big-endian', while x86 chips are 'little-endian'. Endian'ness' refers to which way the binary numbers are formatted with respect to the inner workings of the CPU (whether the first bit in a number is the 'most significant' bit or 'least significant' bit). It would be analagous to the difference between writing the number one-thousand left to right as "1000" or right to left as "0001".
The pseudo little endian mode of the G3 and G4 allowed you to tell the CPU "this is a little endian number" and the CPU would do whatever conversions necessary to work with it, making it a bit easier to work with binary x86 code - the PPC CPU could do some of the emulation work that would otherwise have to be done in software. The G5 doesn't have this mode, so MS had to go through all of the VPC code and remove any dependencies on it (for the G5 at least), come up with a software method of implementing the same function, and then test it to make sure it worked. Not an entirely trivial task.
Being Microsoft, I'm surprised it didn't take them longer....