Review of Macintosh Virtual PC 6.1 with Windows 2000
Virtual PC is a very attractive package for those
who need to occasionally run a Windows program, or those who are looking for a
painless way to transfer files between the Windows and Mac domains. It has
steep hardware requirements, though I was surprised at how well it ran on my
Powerbook G4.
I first tried Virtual PC 1.0 back in the days when
it shipped with Windows 3.1... boy, was that painful, watching it crawl along,
painstakingly drawing lines in OrCad while I waited. I gave up on it in very
short order.
Fast forward to 2003... finding myself in need of a way to run a Windows-only auction management program (Archetype auction software ), I decided to give Virtual PC 6.1 from Microsoft a try. The auction management program is a vanilla windows program, written with standard Microsoft Foundation Classes, displaying mostly forms for data entry and rows of data in tables. I expected it to be a very undemanding application for a Windows emulator.
I chose the Windows 2000 version of Virtual PC 6.1, as being the best compromise between speed and modernity. Windows 98 is rumored to be a bit faster, but crashes more often and is no longer supported by Microsoft. The XP versions are resource hogs even on real PC hardware; XP is primarily about better multimedia experience, and that wasn't what I was shooting for. Hence, Windows 2000.
Installation was a snap, especially compared to doing a real install of Windows 2000. It takes only a few minutes to install Virtual PC itself from the CD; a few more minutes and you can have a ready-to-boot virtual PC disk image ready to boot from. Once booted, it looks exactly like a real PC screen in a window on your Mac; you can change the size of the screen by right clicking on the blank area of the desktop, and selecting the desired resolution, just as you would on a real PC. I opened Internet Explorer, and the default networking setting immediately put me onto the Internet, where I downloaded a series of Windows updates. All of this went much faster and smoother than I could have imagined. It didn't take me long to conclude that Virtual PC on my Mac was faster than Windows 98 on my wife's old HP Celeron 266 (granted, a very low bar, but it is the standard of comparison at our house). It flies through the auction application: windows snap open, it keeps up with typing as fast as I can type, all in all works great. As a final severe test, I opened Windows Media Player from within Windows 2000, and set it to play an MP3 broadcast from WKSU in Kent, Ohio; I heard classical music coming from the Mac in a few seconds, completely without drop-outs or hiccups. I was just amazed.
Some folks, however, have found Virtual PC to be a well-designed package, but unbearably slow on their hardware. So, why is my experience so different from this reviewer's experience ? I think that the difference, in one word, is cache. Virtual PC loves cache, and the more (and faster) the better. When Virtual PC does translation of a stream of instructions destined for a Pentium, having cache means that repeated executions of that stream are just sitting in the nearby cache, rather than far away down the bus sitting in main memory. All modern G3/G4 processors have Level 1 cache (32k program/32k data), most have Level 2 cache (256k program/data), but only a few have Level 3 cache. My computer has a G4 processor, with 1 Meg of Level 3 cache. The processor speed of 1 GHz helps, as does having enough ram to keep both OS X and Windows 2000 from paging memory out to disk. The iMac series has no level 3 cache at all, which is likely why running Virtual PC on an iMac is unbearable. Some desktop models of the Mac are rumored to have 2 Meg of cache - that's the system that you really want to use with Virtual PC!
Connectix, the original developers of Virtual PC, put in some very nice features to link the virtual Windows environment to the Mac environment. One feature is that you can share folders with the Mac side of your computer; files that you put in a shared folder are visible from the Mac Finder. There is also drag and drop transfer of files from the Mac desktop to the Windows desktop, and vice versa. You can also mount a Virtual PC hard disk as a separate volume on your Mac, and access any file that way. If you desire, you can have a Windows Start Menu in your OS X dock; if you choose a program from the Start Menu, Virtual PC will fire up your virtual PC and start running the program. CD's that you put in your computer while Virtual PC is running can be seen by Windows, and USB printers that you connect to your Mac can be accessed by Windows when OS X isn't printing to them. In general, the integration features are well thought out and work without fiddling.
Are there any warts at all? Well, yes, a couple. One is that Virtual PC emulates a fixed set of hardware, that actually has little relation to your actual hardware. For instance, it emulates a simple 2D video card; this keeps the speed up, but it means that you are not going to be able to run the latest games that require 3-D accelerated video cards. You really shouldn't be expecting to run that kind of program on Virtual PC anyway, as games are probably the most demanding software in terms of resources and speed.
Also, note that Virtual PC cannot make use of disk burning hardware that exists on your computer - your CD-R/W or DVD-R will appear as a simple read-only CD.
The one thing about Virtual PC that has frustrated me the most concerns disk image size. When you create a Virtual PC it stores the guest operating system (Windows 2000 in my case) on a special file called the disk image. This file represents the hard disk of a real Windows computer. The default disk image that you get when you create a new virtual computer can ultimately hold 15 Gig of data, though it initially takes up only about 800 meg on your Mac hard disk; it does this with a dynamically expanding trick where the disk image grows bigger as you add Windows files to it. My first beef is that you cannot make any other size than 15 gigabytes and expect to install Windows 2000 on it using the Virtual PC disks. My second beef is that the stated procedure for compacting disk images does not work for me, despite repeated attempts. So you are kind of stuck with a disk image that could potentially grow and grow up to 15 gig.
Just for the record, my successful experience is based on the following:
1 GHz G4 processor
768 Meg of ram, with 192 Meg dedicated to Windows 2000
64 Meg of graphics ram
OS X 10.2.6
Windows 2000 SP 4, with selected services turned off (see www.blackviper.com for recommendations on what services you can safely disable; the fewer background services running, the faster your applications will run).
All in all, Virtual PC has been a great success for me so far.
Fast forward to 2003... finding myself in need of a way to run a Windows-only auction management program (Archetype auction software ), I decided to give Virtual PC 6.1 from Microsoft a try. The auction management program is a vanilla windows program, written with standard Microsoft Foundation Classes, displaying mostly forms for data entry and rows of data in tables. I expected it to be a very undemanding application for a Windows emulator.
I chose the Windows 2000 version of Virtual PC 6.1, as being the best compromise between speed and modernity. Windows 98 is rumored to be a bit faster, but crashes more often and is no longer supported by Microsoft. The XP versions are resource hogs even on real PC hardware; XP is primarily about better multimedia experience, and that wasn't what I was shooting for. Hence, Windows 2000.
Installation was a snap, especially compared to doing a real install of Windows 2000. It takes only a few minutes to install Virtual PC itself from the CD; a few more minutes and you can have a ready-to-boot virtual PC disk image ready to boot from. Once booted, it looks exactly like a real PC screen in a window on your Mac; you can change the size of the screen by right clicking on the blank area of the desktop, and selecting the desired resolution, just as you would on a real PC. I opened Internet Explorer, and the default networking setting immediately put me onto the Internet, where I downloaded a series of Windows updates. All of this went much faster and smoother than I could have imagined. It didn't take me long to conclude that Virtual PC on my Mac was faster than Windows 98 on my wife's old HP Celeron 266 (granted, a very low bar, but it is the standard of comparison at our house). It flies through the auction application: windows snap open, it keeps up with typing as fast as I can type, all in all works great. As a final severe test, I opened Windows Media Player from within Windows 2000, and set it to play an MP3 broadcast from WKSU in Kent, Ohio; I heard classical music coming from the Mac in a few seconds, completely without drop-outs or hiccups. I was just amazed.
Some folks, however, have found Virtual PC to be a well-designed package, but unbearably slow on their hardware. So, why is my experience so different from this reviewer's experience ? I think that the difference, in one word, is cache. Virtual PC loves cache, and the more (and faster) the better. When Virtual PC does translation of a stream of instructions destined for a Pentium, having cache means that repeated executions of that stream are just sitting in the nearby cache, rather than far away down the bus sitting in main memory. All modern G3/G4 processors have Level 1 cache (32k program/32k data), most have Level 2 cache (256k program/data), but only a few have Level 3 cache. My computer has a G4 processor, with 1 Meg of Level 3 cache. The processor speed of 1 GHz helps, as does having enough ram to keep both OS X and Windows 2000 from paging memory out to disk. The iMac series has no level 3 cache at all, which is likely why running Virtual PC on an iMac is unbearable. Some desktop models of the Mac are rumored to have 2 Meg of cache - that's the system that you really want to use with Virtual PC!
Connectix, the original developers of Virtual PC, put in some very nice features to link the virtual Windows environment to the Mac environment. One feature is that you can share folders with the Mac side of your computer; files that you put in a shared folder are visible from the Mac Finder. There is also drag and drop transfer of files from the Mac desktop to the Windows desktop, and vice versa. You can also mount a Virtual PC hard disk as a separate volume on your Mac, and access any file that way. If you desire, you can have a Windows Start Menu in your OS X dock; if you choose a program from the Start Menu, Virtual PC will fire up your virtual PC and start running the program. CD's that you put in your computer while Virtual PC is running can be seen by Windows, and USB printers that you connect to your Mac can be accessed by Windows when OS X isn't printing to them. In general, the integration features are well thought out and work without fiddling.
Are there any warts at all? Well, yes, a couple. One is that Virtual PC emulates a fixed set of hardware, that actually has little relation to your actual hardware. For instance, it emulates a simple 2D video card; this keeps the speed up, but it means that you are not going to be able to run the latest games that require 3-D accelerated video cards. You really shouldn't be expecting to run that kind of program on Virtual PC anyway, as games are probably the most demanding software in terms of resources and speed.
Also, note that Virtual PC cannot make use of disk burning hardware that exists on your computer - your CD-R/W or DVD-R will appear as a simple read-only CD.
The one thing about Virtual PC that has frustrated me the most concerns disk image size. When you create a Virtual PC it stores the guest operating system (Windows 2000 in my case) on a special file called the disk image. This file represents the hard disk of a real Windows computer. The default disk image that you get when you create a new virtual computer can ultimately hold 15 Gig of data, though it initially takes up only about 800 meg on your Mac hard disk; it does this with a dynamically expanding trick where the disk image grows bigger as you add Windows files to it. My first beef is that you cannot make any other size than 15 gigabytes and expect to install Windows 2000 on it using the Virtual PC disks. My second beef is that the stated procedure for compacting disk images does not work for me, despite repeated attempts. So you are kind of stuck with a disk image that could potentially grow and grow up to 15 gig.
Just for the record, my successful experience is based on the following:
1 GHz G4 processor
768 Meg of ram, with 192 Meg dedicated to Windows 2000
64 Meg of graphics ram
OS X 10.2.6
Windows 2000 SP 4, with selected services turned off (see www.blackviper.com for recommendations on what services you can safely disable; the fewer background services running, the faster your applications will run).
All in all, Virtual PC has been a great success for me so far.
Posted: Mon - November 10, 2003 at 07:15 PM
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