Virtual PC Help

i'm new to mac and just ordered an ibook the other day. i'm trying to find out about Virtual PC but everything i find is unhelpful. anyone have experience with this? i think it would be useful for me to be able to run certain windows programs on my ibook when i'm on the road.

I recently tried it on my mac mini, programs don't run very quickly with it. What application do you need to run?

no program in particular. i would do my design work on my desktop because i feel the iBooks screen is to small for that. i really just want to be able to share files and interact with PC's.

I just installed Virtual PC 7 and am in the process of installing WinXP Pro on it right now. So far Virtual PC crashed on me a few times during the install...hopefully I'll get it running correctly at some point tonight.

What type of questions do you have?

Verrminator said:

i really just want to be able to share files and interact with PC's.

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Mac OS X can do that just fine without Virtual PC

Verrminator said:

i'm new to mac and just ordered an ibook the other day. i'm trying to find out about Virtual PC but everything i find is unhelpful. anyone have experience with this? i think it would be useful for me to be able to run certain windows programs on my ibook when i'm on the road.

Click to expand...

I've installed VPC7 several weeks ago and I wasn't too impressed (IMHO). I only needed it to install one program called Definity Site Administration (DSA) to administer our PBX. After playing with VPC for a few days, I uninstalled it...

Since I have access to high-speed internet where ever I go, I use Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) to connect to either my WinXP at work or at home and do what I need to do that's installed on those boxes...

I think you should run a trial version and see if it meets your needs. As far as file sharing with "PCs", you shouldn't have any issues, and as for "interacting with PCs", that depends on what/how you define "interact."


Cheers,

RR

Just an update...my crashing problem was due to a dirty WinXP CD. Don't want you to think there is anything wrong w/ the actual software. I'll let you know how well it performs once I get everything installed.

?: It seems that Virtual PC limits me to using 512MB of RAM. Is that a hard limit, or does it just let me use half of what I have installed in my system?

Well...I got Virtual PC installed, and the performance really isn't great at all. It isn't the type of environment that I would like to work with in on a regular basis. I would much prefer to remote connect to one of my PCs.

Avid6eek said:

Well...I got Virtual PC installed, and the performance really isn't great at all. It isn't the type of environment that I would like to work with in on a regular basis. I would much prefer to remote connect to one of my PCs.

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As I've stated before, I always have access to high-speed connection to work and home, so RDC is much better for me and I only need to use one application. Overall, VPC7 for me is a waste of HDD space, time and money. But to some, its very helpful to them =)

The problem with VPC is and always will be that processor emulation just doesn't yield very good performance. Ever. If you want to network and interact with your PCs, you can do it just fine without having VPC installed. Unless you have a program for Windows only that you desperately need, there is no real point to VPC.

I installed VPC7 including XP, purely to be able to synchronise with a Pocket PC. This part of it does work well - a lot better than PocketMac for example - but getting ActiveSync installed and happy does take a lot of stuffing about.

Good thing - the whole Virtual PC hardware and software is saved in one file, which makes it easy to backup the 'machine' at several different levels, eg
- XP installed
- Active Sync and Office installed
- full working system
If something goes wrong, you revert to a clean saved installation without having to 're-install'.

cheers.

I'm using Virtual PC (with XP Pro) to run a few Windows programs left over from my pre-conversion days. Like everyone else says, it's slow but it gets the job done. It's in no way a substitute for running a PC-- it's really a band-aid.

It's usually easy for the Mac and Windows machines to share files between apps, but I would recommend finding native Mac apps to do what you want.

I have 768 MB on my iBook, and the maximum memory allocation it allows for VPC is 512 MB.