VirtualPC experience - slow or not?

[mabaker]

I have heard and read several reports of MS VirtualPC 7 being really fast on certain machines, others didn’t have so much luck including me: Powermac, Powerbook 1GHz, both running VirtualPC like MOLASSES, and I mean it.

Some ppl actually used VirtualPC to compile apps, play games, design Flash animations (!!!!) and I say on my systems it’s UNTHINKABLE cuzz it’s utterly slow, even with all the transitions off Windows XP acts like a proper turtle.

What have yours experiences with Virtual PC been? Slow? Or rather acceptable that you could compare it to a slower and older gen PC and vould still get the work done?

 

[Nermal]

SLOW, especially with XP. When I used it back in 2005, I would always run Win 2000 because it was faster than XP... but still very, very slow.

 

[miles01110]

Slow doesn't even do it justice. "Unuseable" is more like it.

 

[mabaker]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Have you guys ever heard various reports coming from ppl that did NOT have any problems whatsoever with virtualpc? Did you believe any?

I was astonished to know that ppl were or are actually till this very day able be it on Leo or tiger to use their windows installs for some proper work!

 

[4JNA]

slow with a capital SL

SLOW, especially with XP. When I used it back in 2005, I would always run Win 2000 because it was faster than XP... but still very, very slow.

same here. i was using VPC7 with 2000 on a dual 1.8 G5, and did an insane amount of tweaking to get it to a usable state. i used 2000Lite to do most the tweaking with, and then services and such line by line. not fun. i don't work with or endorse them, just used them in that case to create a usable machine.

way faster/cheaper/easier idea is setting up an XP Pro box under the desk and using RDC on the PPC desktop to use/control the xp box. works well, still xp in a window, and much faster and easier to support or upgrade. best of luck.

 

[Ungibbed]

I was still rocking a 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4 until I bought my MBP a few months ago. For my Windows tasks, I used Windows NT Workstation (SP6).

While long in the tooth, it got the job done for most tasks and performed great with VPC. I remember slamming my head on my desk when I tried Xp Pro on my PPC Mac. Went back to my old friend Windows NT and office apps worked great.

 

[gavingrant]

vpc

yeah virtual pc is great running virtual pc 5 with xp run fast for me and hey how to run windows vista on virtual pc 5
on yeah i entered the bios setting cool huh

virtual pc 3 could enable 3dgraphics card!!!!!!!!
and yeah in mac os x virtual pc kinda slow
mac os 9 fast

 

[gavingrant]

xp is great

SLOW, especially with XP. When I used it back in 2005, I would always run Win 2000 because it was faster than XP... but still very, very slow.

hey i am running windows xp its like i am running about 500mhz and my mac is 700 mhz do tweaking

 

[Bloodstar]

Dev-C++ (say what you want, my college class required it) under 2000 on my iBook G4 (1.33, 768MB at the time) was decent. Compiled slowly, but it was usable.

I'd imagine some older apps would work, and NT4 might be usable if you can make it work. 2000 isn't too bad, though.

What I'm thinking about, though, is doing MS-DOS stuff under it. Hopefully it'd run acceptably... (that, or dosbox, but eh.)

 

[chrismacguy]

I never could get XP working well enough in VPC (This was on a PowerMac G4 Dual 800)....so I did the (silly)sensible thing and bought a PC to use XP on.... I mean it worked, but it still seems insane to me thats what I had to do. Its also the one thing that my Intel Mac is definitely much better at - running XP in a little box in the corner so I can use Visual Studio the 2 times a month I need to without waiting 8 months for it to load. (I wouldve used 2000, but I didn't have a 2000 License - XP was awful.)

 

[gavingrant]

xp speed

its slow for u guys but not me

1 delete the fonts
2 use notepad and type mystring(800000000) and save it as ram.vbe
3 do not install an antivirus
4 disable all services in msconfig disable all startup items
5 remove background
6 disable sound
7 delete unuseful files

8 u can either disable theme or keep it

9 when installing xp convert to NTFS
MDK
megaman
burgershop2
cake mania 1 and 2
MDK
fish tycoon
other..........................

 

[Electricidad]

Its usable, but what do you expect when even on The Best PPC ever made (DC2.3) it can only emulate an 800Mhz PIII?

The best thing I did was watch craigslist and pick up a 3.2GHz P4 Dell for free.

 

[gavingrant]

Xp fast

 

[gavingrant]

convert to ntfs when installing xp

 

[IndigoQuack]

I ran Windows 2000 via VPC on an iMac G5 "iSight" 2.1GHz a few years ago. It was certainly no speed demon, but I found it somewhat useable. That said, I wasn't doing any "heavy lifting" with it.

 

[Phil A.]

Virtual PC brings back very bad memories for me: I would count myself among the people who considered it "unusable": I had it on a PowerMac G5 and it was horrendously slow.
Fast forward to the Intel age and VMWare Fusion and Parallels are a whole different board game: I use Fusion regularly and it is very, very quick (Windows 7 is smooth as butter even with Aero turned on). Of course, the difference is that modern virtualisation software doesn't have to translate Intel Op Codes to PPC ones, and can also take advantage of hardware virtualisation built into modern Intel chips.

 

[zen.state]

It's emulation so it's slow as hell. I used to run it on my G4 1.8GHz and although not unusable is certainly isn't very fluid. I was running XP SP3 in VPC 7 running in Leopard.

 

[gavingrant]

downgrading

It's emulation so it's slow as hell. I used to run it on my G4 1.8GHz and although not unusable is certainly isn't very fluid. I was running XP SP3 in VPC 7 running in Leopard.

switch to windows xp sp1

 

[zen.state]

downgrade fool to windows xp sp1 and do tweaking

Apparently you didn't actually read the post you quoted. I said I used to run it as in I no longer do. You will have to show me how to downgrade something I don't have..

Also.. using a less secure version for a little extra performance is just silly.

 

[gavingrant]

??

Virtual pc 5 is faster in mac os 9