Another Virtual PC Question

I'm running Virtual PC on my PowerBook G4 with 1.5 gig of ram but I notice that when it is running (usually for MS OneNote 2007) The battery life is horrible, maybe 2 hours max and that is with the screen brightness turned way down and airport & Bluetooth off. Is Virtual PC a battery hog? And if so is this also the case running OS-X and Parallels on the MacBooks at the same time?

Well on a laptop any processor intensive app will drastically reduce battery life. Virtual PC is very processor intensive.

I concur. Virtual PC has to recalculate everything you do from Mac-Language to Windows-Language, so it's basically a full-time translation job running off your processor.

Intel processors cut that out, because now Windows and Macs kinda speak the same language, if you will.

yogi said:

I concur. Virtual PC has to recalculate everything you do from Mac-Language to Windows-Language, so it's basically a full-time translation job running off your processor.

Intel processors cut that out, because now Windows and Macs kinda speak the same language, if you will.

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Keep in mind that when you run Virtual PC, your PPC CPU needs to do x86 emulation to run Windows and Windows applications. The harder the CPU has to run, the more power it uses. When you run Parallels on a Mac, there is no CPU emulation so you'll use just as much processing power as you would running native Mac applications.

Thanks, I've also noticed my G4 gets much warmer when running Virtual PC.

Dillinger-63 said:

Thanks, I've also noticed my G4 gets much warmer when running Virtual PC.

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More processing power = more work = more heat.