Customer Reviews

Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac 7.0 Upgrade [Old Version]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having run Virtual PC 6 on my 12" 1GHz PowerBook for over a year I was curious about the supposed performance improvements to Virtual PC 7. I run virtual machines for Windows 98SE, Windows XP Home (came with VPC6), and Debian Linux. Under VPC6, Linux was very fast, Win98 acceptable, and WinXP useable if I turned off the default theme and used the classic theme (looks like Win 2000) and tweaked every parameter I could fine. VPC 7 upgraded easily, even the virtual machines that it claimed it didn't support which were Linux and Win98. WinXP required me to reactivate Windows. In fact, it has requested me to reactivate it twice which I hope is the last time. So what do you get moving from VPC6 to VPC7?, not much. MS has written special Windows drivers for XP and 2000 that hook the display driver and pass some funtions over the Virtual PC for handling at a higher level than previously. This speeds up certian GUI operations, but has no impact on the raw CPU speed. In fact, it doesn't look like they changed the Pentium emulation for the G4/G3 at all. All the work was done for the G5. I get the same emulated CPU performance under VPC7 as I did under VPC6. It looks like they have improved printing integration but I have not tried that. VPC has also updated some of the other emulated hardware. PCI peripherals are now emulated, including a different network adapter. Not sure why this was needed, as emulated peripherals don't care if they are on an emulated PCI bus or not. In fact, I wish MS had spent more time writing VPC7 aware windows drivers like the display driver for the rest of the peripherals, especially sound which is still choppy. Hopefully MS will include these drivers in future updates to VPC7 without making us upgrade to VPC8 (wishful thinking).

In summary, if you are running Windows XP or Windows 2000 and have a graphically intensive application, Virtual PC 7 upgrade will give you a little boost. How much depends on the graphical nature of the app. 'Little' is the operative term here. If you are running an older version of Windows or other OS under Virtual PC 6, Virtual PC 7 will give you precisely zero percent improvement.

I actually have to adjust my comments on VPC 7 (from my old post here which was titled "Emulation With Virtual PC 7.0.1 Slows To A Crawl"), in light of recent events. Just after I made my earlier post, for some reason my Win XP Pro virtual drive would no longer start up -- I believe that it may have been corrupted when I upgraded from VPC 6.1 -> VPC 7, (when you have to migrate the drives over). In any case, I tried to fix the problem, but when that didn't work, I instead used the problem as an excuse to completely reinstall a copy of Win XP Pro on my new VPC 7.0.1, in order to see if a clean install of it would make the OS work any faster.

I was quite surprised at the results. After installing Win XP Pro cleanly on VPC 7.1 without a problem, I noticed a dramatic increase in speed. I can now definitively say that my copy of Win XP Pro is as fast on VPC 7.0.1 as it was on VPC 6.1, though I now believe it is actually even a little faster. The speed on my Win XP is still not quite as fast as an older OS runs on VPC 7, like my copy of Win 98 SE, but there is a remarkable improvement in speed since I did a clean install of VPC 7.

My new take on VPC 7: For G5 users, it's a must-have, since you guys can't use anything older than VPC 7. For G4 users who are previous owners of VPC 6.x: It's questionable if you really *need* to purchase VPC 7 at the moment. While eventually Microsoft may be able to boost the speed of VPC even further, right now there appears to be only a slight increase in speed over VPC 6.x. There are some new useful features to VPC 7, such as improved printer support, and the new "save state in the background" feature, but other than that there has been only several other minor improvements from VPC 6.x, which doesn't make it an absolute necesity for G4 users to purchase. If your computers have anything less than a 1 Ghz processor, and 1 GB of RAM, I wouldn't recommending upgrading to VPC 7 from VPC 6, as you likely wouldn't see any improvement in speed because of VPC 7's new hefty requirements on processor speed and available RAM. If you feel like a small boost in speed and some other minor (but nice) features are worth the $79 upgrade, by all means go for it -- it certainly won't be any worse than VPC 6.x was for you. If anything, it should be a little better. G3 users should definitely not upgrade as your computers won't have the processing power available to run VPC 7. I got away with VPC 6.1 on my old G3 PowerBook, but that's as far as I would have gotten.

P.S. - I would up the rating from this product from 2 to 4 stars, but I cannot change my old rating. I would personally rate this product about 4 stars - it delivered on what it promised, but there weren't a ton of new features to want to write home about.

Hope this helps everyone!

I purchased MS Virtual PC 7.0 w/Windows XP about six months ago for use on my 1.33 Ghz G4 iBook.

Setup was relatively easy and took about an hour and a half to complete. Unfortunately, it was all down hill from there.

My main reason for buying Virtual PC was to run MS Money 2005 Deluxe on my Mac (Quicken for Mac is terrible, but that's another story). It took about 5 minutes to open my Money file. This was followed by an endless series of painfully long wait times between key strokes. Eventually it locked up completely. After about six more attempts I gave up.

I tried playing several games like Rise of Nations and Age of Empires but they were just as tedious and often locked up during the initial loading. I strongly recommend against attempting to play and games on Virtual PC!

One main problem with this program is that Virtual PC does not allow your computer to use its onboard video card. Instead it attempts to emulate an old 16MB S3 Trio video card with software only.

Additionally, the maximum amount of System RAM Virtual PC will allow you to allocate is limited to 512 MB despite the fact that I have 1.25 GB of RAM available.

Hopefully the next version removes the RAM limit and allows your system to use its video card instead of the painfully slow emulator. This program promises so much, but disappoints at nearly every junction. It's just far too tedious for everyday use in it's current form.

In all fairness, it should be noted that MS postponed native graphics card support in the initial release of VPC v7. If you look at the Display Control Panel, you should see that VPC is still emulating an S3 Trio. They were under pressure to get G5 support out the door as quickly as possible and postponed some of the planned enhancements. I believe that native graphics card support is due in an update sometime in early 2005.

Beware...this "upgrade" drops support for anything less than Windows 2000. The system requirements mainly pertain to the Mac side of things and even Microsoft's site simply states that a "licensed copy of Windows" is required. Well, my copy of Windows 98 is licensed but doesn't work. Others have apparently migrated Win98SE but I had no such luck and met with disaster (thank gooodness for backups). So...It's great that it works on my G5, but unfortunately its useless unless I go out and buy WinXP or 2000 and go through the pain of migrating my PC info.

This is the 3rd version of Virtual PC I have upgraded to and finally I have a product that has me satisfied. It is much faster than previous versions. Works well on my G4 and awesome on my G5.

It works pretty well, but (as other reviewers have stated) VPC is an absolute BEAST on your systems resources. You have to keep in mind that you're (basically) running two operating systems at the same time; and, unfortunately, both Win XP and OS/X are rather demanding on your system's RAM and processor speed.

Again, VPC works well and I'd have no problem recommending it, but MAKE SURE you have at least a Gig of RAM and a G5 processor. Anything less and (although it may still work) you'll be so displeased with the performance that you'll want to put your head through a wall.

I have not installed this yet, but I'm going to buy a Windows XP software to install on it as well.