steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

     I had used Virtual PC on my original PowerBook I bought back in 2000 - the first Mac I actually purchased for myself. (I had used Macs at Hillsdale College but was less than happy with OS 8 and 9 - in fact, it was a thorn in my side because the TCP/IP stack shipped (or added as a "module") with those Macs were less than adequate and there might have been something with the network interface cards (I'm not sure and I left before figuring it out) - they didn't play well with our DHCP server and they didn't like our Nortel BayStack switches. It was an absolute pain in the butt...) That PowerBook ran at 677 MHz using the G4 processor. It was great with native applications but running any i386 system with Virtual PC was a waste of time. It only helped in the most extreme of cases because it was so darn slow. I know the laptop wasn't the most powerful of systems but in comparison, I could run a different version of Windows via VMWare on a PIII 550 laptop with little problems - it was slow, but not slow like molasses. (Yes, I realize that part of this is the fact that a lot of true emulation programming was going on in Virtual PC whereas VMWare emulated the same hardware using the same hardware - but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was slow.) When I purchased 2 G5's (a dual 2.0 and single 1.6) for Anywhere Technology and saw the huge leap in speed with the G5 processors, I thought that a lot of the issues I saw before with Virtual PC would be abated. Well, I was right - and wrong. First, no version of Virtual PC that had shipped (6.x at that time) was compatible with the G5 processors. It wasn't that big of a deal because I had a plethora of other machines I could stick Windows on, but my office was getting hot enough as is with all the processors blasting out heat and I wanted to minimize the stockpiling that was going on - the waste notwithstanding.
     When Virtual PC 7 finally shipped (I cringed at the thought of pushing some serious money in Microsoft's direction, but it must be said that they are still the standard in office suites and they are one of the largest software producers for the Mac platform), I snapped up a copy asap. I figured there would be some improvement in speed just because of the processor speed jump I had made, but I was in for a real surprise. While I have no actual time tests to compare, the speed of VPC 7 on my Dual 2.0 G5 is unbelievable. Really. I have thus far installed Win XP, Win NT, Win 98, Win 2K and now OpenBSD without any problems and in less time than it would have taken on most other x386 machines - not some of my more high powered ones, but the normal 1.5 GHz Celeron machines.
     If you are in a position where you need to work with Windows either for development or trouble-shooting (with Anywhere Technology, most of my clients use Windows based PC's and walking them through problems on the phone has required that I have a Windows machine - with their version of Win - in front of me), Virtual PC 7 on the G5 is fantastic. I wouldn't use it for trying to replace a gamer's workstation or something we would set up for an engineer using CAD (where Windows may be required), but it is a fantastic fill-in. It is as fantastic as I thought VMWare was for the PC/i386 platform. One thing I cannot do, is speak for how well it works (or doesn't work) on the G4 platform. I have my PowerBook with a 1.25GHz processor sitting next to me that I have yet to test. Regardless, it works well on the G5 and it has saved me a lot of time and has allowed me to streamline the way I deal with trouble-shooting Windows related problems. Thumbs up.