Virtual PC hard drives??

[callan]

I have a problem with using certain VBA add-ins in Excel. I have 'liberated' a few add-ins that I use at work to use at home, they are quite complex and use a few .dll files, therefore not working on my Mac.

Its began to pee me off so much that Ive considered buying a PC to do work at home! Dont want to do this as it'd be the only reason to get one, I switched to Mac 3 years ago and love it.

Question is....

Can I mount a drive in VPC such that the drive can be seen in OSX at the same time?

I can then use Mac Excel to do my main work but use an Excel sheet running in VPC with Windows to do my VBA calculations. With the two Excel sheets linked together I should be able to feed my VBA calculated results back to OS X. I have a USB flash drive, would it be simpler to use this as a bridge between the two operating systems?

This all sounds an overly complicated set up and I hope Ive explained it OK, but anything to avoid buying a Dell!

On another note, i've heard that VPC runs quicker using an external hard drive? Any experience of this? Comments?

C

 

[witness]

I have a problem with using certain VBA add-ins in Excel. I have 'liberated' a few add-ins that I use at work to use at home, they are quite complex and use a few .dll files, therefore not working on my Mac.

Its began to pee me off so much that Ive considered buying a PC to do work at home! Dont want to do this as it'd be the only reason to get one, I switched to Mac 3 years ago and love it.

Question is....

Can I mount a drive in VPC such that the drive can be seen in OSX at the same time?

I can then use Mac Excel to do my main work but use an Excel sheet running in VPC with Windows to do my VBA calculations. With the two Excel sheets linked together I should be able to feed my VBA calculated results back to OS X. I have a USB flash drive, would it be simpler to use this as a bridge between the two operating systems?

This all sounds an overly complicated set up and I hope Ive explained it OK, but anything to avoid buying a Dell!

On another note, i've heard that VPC runs quicker using an external hard drive? Any experience of this? Comments?

C

You can easily share files between VPC and OSX by either sharing drives or folders or simply using drag and drop.

Running VPC on an external hard drive will theoretically run faster because Windows will not be contending with OSX for drive access, however, the translation between PPC and x86 instructions is the real bottleneck, any gain from an external hard drive will probably not be noticeable.

When Intel Macs come out next year or the year after, VPC will be very fast and there will be no need for a separate windows box. If you only need windows for the occasional excel spreadsheet you can probably put up with it running very slow, but if you want top performance right now and can't wait till x86 Macs then you might consider a separate box.