VPC7 w/ XP or 2000 on iBook?

whiteshark

I hope to make the switch to Apple this holiday season. However, I work in a mixed Apple/PC environment and I need to be able to run some PC software. I wanted to know if there was a performace and/or stability difference between Windows 2000 or Windows XP on a G4 iBook. I have used Windows 2000 on my own PC's because it was less CPU intensive and generally had fewer gimicks that could crash the system. I was just wondering if the same holds true running VPC7 on a Mac. Any experiences?



TIA,



Whiteshark

macfly

hmmmm. well, i just got it with xp pro for a desktop dual 2.0 g5. works ok on that but would by no means call it snappy. put it on my girlfriends 12inch powerbook 1.3. once she upgraded to 768 MB ram it runs ok,,again not snappy...i would think of it as a last resort type of program. games are out of the question. if its labor intensive it wont run all that quickly. there are some things u can do to make it faster, like going to the administrative tools part of the control panel and shutting off themes and some others....going to My Computer (advanced tab) and setting it to 'best performance' helps too. there is a review on amazon that says all the services to shut off to help speed it up. basically, u can only alot it 512 MB of ram so ....

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neutrino23

I haven't run XP but I do run w2000 on a G4 PowerBook. As macfly points out, it is adequate for some things but not speedy. The good news is that it will work. If you are doing spread sheets or text editing or something on that level it would be OK. However, anything that is crunching a lot of data would run very slowly. I'd guess roughly a half or third the speed you'd expect from a vanilla PC.



I have some in-house software I need to run on windows. For daily work I'll use a pc. I'll use VPC when I don't have the pc with me or if I need to do things like take screen shots for making reports.



If possible, get a demo of what you need to do before committing to it.



One alternative is to put the PC under your desk and control it with Microsoft Remote Desktop.

www.microsoft.com/mac/download/misc/rdc.asp

This will be fast enough and it lets you run with just one monitor, keyboard and mouse.

telekon

I have VPC7 Windows XP on a G5 1.8MP and I have to honestly say it sucks the big one. Of course it all depends on the software to plan to run but if it's in any way graphics intensive ( and I don't mean games) or you use audio in any way, I would suggest you avoid it. Waste of money. And then of course, there's the virus issue... ouch!

randycat99

I don't know what speed iBook you had in mind, but imo, unless it is the fastest one they sell (with RAM max'd out, as well), running WinXP in VPC will be a serious task in futility. Just trying to get menus and explorer windows open is painful, let alone trying to actually run an app or get real work done. It's something to do with laptop hardware, I think (or perhaps, L2 cache size makes a pivotal difference with how well VPC can run). On a very antiquated Powermac G3, it is actually approaching manageable, but still more work than it's worth, imo. Drop down to running VPC in OS9.x (not Classic within OSX), and then you got something you have a decent chance of running XP. The speed boost is really pretty amazing (as far as emulation standards go).



Stick to the slimmest OS's you can if you want to extract performance. Under all cases, that means something before XP (unless it has some sort of functionality that cannot be patched into an earlier OS).