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CmdrLaForge said:
Are there any benchmark comparisons between XP and 2000 (on the same machine) ? That would be really interesting. I just need any Windows for MS Project and some banking sofware.

In my experience with vpc6, win2k is much faster than xp.
 
GPL

madrobby said:
...On the G5 it might even allow to play older 3d Titles.
Grand Prix Legends anyone? That title is over 6 years old. Caps out (and looks great) at 36fps. Maybe even on-line racing with VROC? Man, that would be SWEET :eek:
 
Win XP got a lot slower on VPC 6 when I installed SP2. I went to MS's site and this is apparently a known issue, but they do not offer a solution.
 
CmdrLaForge said:
I guess we can assume the same is true for VPC 7. Can we?

I'll eat my hat if it's any different :)

VPC's handy for running specific Windows apps. You're most certainly not going to be doing day-to-day stuff (file organisation, web browsing, email, photo manipulation etc) on the emulated PC. So really 95% of XP's 'improvements' over Win2k will be pointless in that situation. Even for coders, there's nothing really XP-specific that would mean 2K wouldn't do (although that's not intended as a catch-all statement!). VPC lets the emulated PC access the host Mac's hard disks natively, so there's nothing stopping you keeping the data you use in the emulated PC nicely organised within your existing OS X home folder.

I guess what I'm saying is treat VPC as an enabling tool to allow you to use specific apps that you require. Start by picking the leanest version of Windows you can get away with. Then, strip down that Windows installation to the minimum needed to run the app you're after, and disable all the bells, whistles, services and programs that aren't necessary.

Also, look at VPC as a sandbox. Use something like Virex on the Mac to scan files for macro viruses before using them within VPC. That way, you avoid having to bog down the emulated machine with a virus scanner. Do all your normal internet use safely on the Mac, and only use IE in the emulator for testing. If you need emulated IE for banking, look at locking down the emulated IE so it can only be used for the banking site. Avoid IE and Outlook if possible. Try Firefox on the Mac, or even Firefox within VPC (technically they should handle sites the same, but you never know!).

Keep the thing lean and isolated. Store your data outside of the virtual machine, in your Mac's home folder. Then, when it's just right, make a backup of the Virtual PC disk image. That way, if and when Windows pukes all over itself, you've got a nice clean system to copy across and work from, with all your data protected on the Mac.

Hope some of that diatribe's useful!
 
Hoping it's faster too...

Here's my experience with the product.

- Use it to write some ASP.Net pages for work:
1) Get Dreamweaver, which has "Code Completion" for C# and VB.NET ASP pages. Microsoft's web matrix, is free, but takes a long time to load, paging is slow, And it doesn't have Code Completion.

2) You can use Virtual PC -- XP Pro to run IIS web server and test your pages, by sharing a folder on your Mac.

3) VPC will allocate 1/2 of your RAM for it's memory requirements.
I've got 1 gig, so VPC targets 500meg, at actually uses 550. It also uses about 777meg of Virtual memory on my machine. So there is some Disk Swapping when switching applications. ( Run as few applications, concurrently, in Windows XP as possible. But, as you can afford it, Increase your memory to 2gig on a laptop, and probably 3gig on a desktop.

This will allow VPC to keep All of itself in real memory and not in virtual memory( on your hard disk ).

It's usable but, I'd say it's best to try to find a cross-platform solution where ever possible.

If you can connect to work using Microsoft's RDC( Remote Desktop Connection ) thru VPN then that's the preferred way to go.

I will be getting the update.
 
amin said:
Win XP got a lot slower on VPC 6 when I installed SP2. I went to MS's site and this is apparently a known issue, but they do not offer a solution.

Not even "upgrade to VPC 7 with XP SP2 pre-installed?" It must really be screwed up ;)

Seriously, though, I wouldn't be surprised if their security "fixes" added more overhead to the system. If you have a pre-sp2 disk image, you might want to compare the number of processes then vs. now. For example, isn't the XP firewall turned on by default under SP2? If it is, I would think that you could use the Mac's firewall instead. Just a thought.
 
RIP said:
MS says that upgrade cards and accelerators are not supported. Being that I just purchased an upgrade for my machine bringing it from a single 466 7400 to a dual 1.33 7457, I'm a bit concerned.

I wonder if it simply will not work or if I simply cannot be supported for any issues that may crop up if I use it on a machine with an upgraded CPU.

Can anyone who may have a beta of this have anything to add?
When they say "not supported" in this context, what they usually mean is "we didn't test it in that configuration and if you call for tech support with that configuration we'll hang up on you."

Whether or not the program actually works is another matter altogether. Your best bet is to hope someone reading your message can give you a first-hand anecdote. Asking in a wider forum (like an appropriate newsgroup) in a few weeks (when people have had a chance to try it out) may also be a good idea.
 
SiliconAddict said:
Disable 90% of the services XP runs in the background (Does a desktop really need wireless zero config enabled by default?!?!?) and speed should be as good as Home. Home is a really bad version of XP to use. If you can stay away from it DO SO. The default security is worse then what is in XP Pro which is scary as heck.
I would also argue that you should disable all networking services. Do your web surfing with Mac applications. Unless it's absolutely necessary that a Windows app have network access (e.g. a database client), you should be able to eliminate networking altogether in the virtual environment.

And if you do so, you speed things up (by not running unused networking code) and close nearly all of the security holes. Even WinXP Home should be fine in this configuration.
 
displaced said:
Then, strip down that Windows installation to the minimum needed to run the app you're after, and disable all the bells, whistles, services and programs that aren't necessary.


I used to have an article that listed a ton of things you could disable to help speed things up. Someone already went through a few things in this thread, but I'm looking to disable a ton of things in order to get speeds up for the things I want to do. Anyone have a link to the article I'm thinking of, or anything else that would help?
 
I don't think it will be faster

I run VPC 6 on my 867 pb with xp and it crawls. Did I mention it crawls. Windoze NT 4 screams. I'm guessing MicroEvil had to make VPC 7 slower on the G5 so as not to show up PeeCees.

Anyone remeber Real PC and the fix it needed to slow down on the first G4? MicroEvil muscled them out too.
 
Do you think we will be able to run old 2d games like say magic online using vpc 7? I hope so here are system specs...

Minimum Requirements:
Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP or Windows NT 4.0
Pentium II 333 MHz
64 MB RAM
600 MB free hard disk space
Video card able to handle 800 x 600 pixels
(1024 x 768 recommended) and Hi Color settings
DirectX 3.0
4X CD-ROM drive
Sound card
Internet connection (56k or better)
Web browser that supports SSL encryption
 
ijimk said:
Do you think we will be able to run old 2d games like say magic online using vpc 7? I hope so here are system specs...

Minimum Requirements:
Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP or Windows NT 4.0
Pentium II 333 MHz
64 MB RAM
600 MB free hard disk space
Video card able to handle 800 x 600 pixels
(1024 x 768 recommended) and Hi Color settings
DirectX 3.0
4X CD-ROM drive
Sound card
Internet connection (56k or better)
Web browser that supports SSL encryption

well on my ibook g4 1.2 ghz according to linux the x86 im running is a i586 running at around 500-700 mhz (it changes)
 
GetSome681 said:
In my experience with vpc6, win2k is much faster than xp.

And 98 is faster than that. I'm running VPC on my 1 GHz PowerBook G4.
One thing- I only have 256 MB of RAM total in the system. Less than VPC's minimum requirement. Yet 98 runs fine!

(Yes, I plan to upgrade the RAM soon...)
 
GFLPraxis said:
And 98 is faster than that. I'm running VPC on my 1 GHz PowerBook G4.
One thing- I only have 256 MB of RAM total in the system. Less than VPC's minimum requirement. Yet 98 runs fine!

(Yes, I plan to upgrade the RAM soon...)

I've tried both win98se and win2k...and win2k was faster for me. Not sure why it's the other way around for you.
 
SeaFox said:
Maybe you should remind them that the internet is supposed to be accessable to everyone equally and not a platform specific medium. :rolleyes:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! "Not platform specific" - oh my that's funny!!! Thanks for the laugh!!

* sigh *

The university I work for (*cough* University of Washington *cough*) was trumpeting a big move to a "Web-based" curriculum for their continuing education offerings - this was about a 18 months ago. As our department's Web person, I was asked to sign up and evaluate this new system. Well, turns out it's not Web-based at all. Actually, it is a bunch of ActiveX programs that you download and then run on your (Windows) machine.

I took the time to write to the director of their program, and explained what "Web-based" actually is supposed to mean (as opposed to "use the Web to distribute stuff", which was what they were doing), and why we wouldn't be participating. She wrote back and basically sounded like she agreed with me - but they'd outsourced the development of this to save money so they were stuck.

Our university is, as a whole, quite friendly to Macs and the *nix crowd - but pinhead bureaucrats can still muck things up.
 
M$

Dammit, giving us XP Pro. VP6 ran faster the older the version of windows you ran. 98 better than 2000 etc. And now I gotta find my ol win98 cds cuz why use XP on VPC when it uses more computing power etc to emulate. Run something easy on the emulator andf you should be fine. VPC IS NEVER INTENDED FOR GAMING. Ever.
 
GetSome681 said:
I used to have an article that listed a ton of things you could disable to help speed things up. Someone already went through a few things in this thread, but I'm looking to disable a ton of things in order to get speeds up for the things I want to do. Anyone have a link to the article I'm thinking of, or anything else that would help?

I don't have it, but I really hope you find it. I want this to be as fast as possible.

I am torn with which version to install. I really want speed, but XP for all of it's problems is the version which MS has put the most security focus on. (I still know it is porous, and it generally sucks.)

I suspect I will try the XP version, and hopefully it will be fast enough for what I need...the once a quarter loading of a windows utility.) If that is no good, then I will trade down, er, up, to an older version.

Oh, and the first thing I will be doing is uninstalling IE and Outlook Express. Bug city...
 
GetSome681 said:
I used to have an article that listed a ton of things you could disable to help speed things up. Someone already went through a few things in this thread, but I'm looking to disable a ton of things in order to get speeds up for the things I want to do. Anyone have a link to the article I'm thinking of, or anything else that would help?
blackviper.com is a good site for this.
 
what abotu these sys requirements.

Win 98/ME/2000/XP
P3 600 Mhz. Athlon K7 600 Mhz or faster
256 MB
32 MB direct X 9 compliant video card
Direct X 9.0b sound device
250 MB free on Harddrive

I have a Dual 2ghz G5 with 1.5 gig of memory and plenty of harddrive. Radeon 9600
 
nexus810 said:
what abotu these sys requirements.

Win 98/ME/2000/XP
P3 600 Mhz. Athlon K7 600 Mhz or faster
256 MB
32 MB direct X 9 compliant video card
Direct X 9.0b sound device
250 MB free on Harddrive

I have a Dual 2ghz G5 with 1.5 gig of memory and plenty of harddrive. Radeon 9600
Is VPC 7 going to support Direct X?
 
My friend who has demoed VP 7 said that there is no native graphic card support, but there is a setting in the memory prefereces to tell the vitual PC how much vram to use, unfortunately, it only allows for 16MB :(

Who knows, maybe the final version is different from the beta.
 
Will VPC7 support USB flash drives? I know that VPC6 doesn't even recognize flash drives.
 
GFLPraxis said:
And 98 is faster than that. I'm running VPC on my 1 GHz PowerBook G4.
One thing- I only have 256 MB of RAM total in the system. Less than VPC's minimum requirement. Yet 98 runs fine!

(Yes, I plan to upgrade the RAM soon...)

I'd slit my wrist before EVER using Win 9x ever again. Have I told you folks about a dream I had one day after a very stressful day of dealing with 98 crashes office wide because of memory issues. My dream ended up being of running around MS's campus with a broken Windows 98 CD hunting down the developers of Win 9x and gutting them. I hate that OS to a level that borders on the maniacal. Windows NT and its children W2K, WXP, and to a lesser extent W2K3 are the only Windows OS’s I will ever touch again. I don’t care how well Win98 is tweaked. You look at a 9x box wrong and it will either crash on you or shut down wrong. NEVER AGAIN. NEVER!
 
I find it funny that on M$'s site, they tout better graphics, cleaner graphics-

ftrsfull_vpc_02.gif


What moron uses a compressed gif image to show clean graphics which sport multiple blends? I'd be horrified if that's what VP 7 looked like on my 23" HD ASD.
 
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