So with the blazing new speed and wall smashing power of the new G5, how will Virtual PC run on it? Will running an emulated version of windows dumb down the G5 so that it will operate on par with a wintel machine?
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
It will still be slow, but maybe not painfully slow anymore. Biggest issue is VPC has no GFx card (2D or 3D) acceleration and no amount of CPU will fix that in the foreseeable future.
Good software could fix it though. If Microsoft decided to (for whatever reason) they could implement a native PowerPC/OpenGL driver for the DirectX Windows subsystem and performance would improve very very dramatically.
Good software could fix it though. If Microsoft decided to (for whatever reason) they could implement a native PowerPC/OpenGL driver for the DirectX Windows subsystem and performance would improve very very dramatically.
Seems like it would be a smart thing for MS to do.
Seems like it would be a smart thing for MS to do.
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
Seems like they could jump on the G5 bandwagon, and after all, they are in the software business and it would sell more versions of windows along with office programs and reduce their Mac development costs. I for one wouldn't mind a good Vitrual PC, there are plenty of programs I could use that are only available for Windows.
Curious though, how good could MS make VirtualPC? Could it get to be almost transparent with 90% of the speed of running native designed MS programs on the Mac?
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
But does it sell fewer copies of the Windows OS? It's my impression that every time someone buys VPC, they are paying for a copy of the Windows OS. When an x86 Windows PC is sold, MS makes its money on is the OS, and of course any bundled MS software the hardware vendor installs. So, wouldn't MS make as much, maybe even more, on VPC than the sale of a Windows PC? I understand MS sells Windows at a reduced price when it is pre-installed.
Regarding your question, the most profitable strategy for MS would be to discourage developers from producing Mac software. If most Macs needed VPC, MS would be making as much or more off each Mac sold as it does each x86 PC.
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
I don't know any PC person who would rather run Windows on a Mac, but lots of Mac people need or want to run Windows-based apps from time to time. If MS were to optimize performance of Virtual PC, it could only be good for them and for Mac people.
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
as a web designer, i could test my code in over a dozen different versions of web browsers ( netscape 4.x (scary), 6 and 7 and internet explorer versions 4 (just as scary) 5 and 6, opera, et al. ) on four different operating systems ( Win 95 at 256 colors and 640x480, Win 98 at thousands of colors at 800x600, and Win 2000 and XP at millions of colors at 1024x768 ) all under VPC environments on my dual 1 ghz quicksilver at my old job. need to free up cycles? no problem -- just save session and come back to it later once i do more work (or get distracted by another project)
honestly, if you aren't using a mac and vpc for web design, then you must either...
a.) be surrounded by a cacophony of old wintel machines to do the same thing
Not according to the conversations I had with Connectix engineers during the VPC4/5 transition. A single OS needs to own a single video card. . .
I realize you may have explained it, but it went over my head. Where is my logic going wrong? I look at this problem like layers in software. An application running in OS X can make use of the graphics card, right? Okay, in this layer, VPC is just another application as far as OS X is concerned, so it can take advantage of, and use, the graphics card. That seems obvious.
Within VPC, there is a layer that takes the output of the Windows OS and converts it as necessary for VPC application interface mentioned above. This in not so obvious, and may be the point of your comments. However, it seems that MS controls the code for Windows, and it may be possible to modify the OS code as needed to make this job easier. They own the whole things, so it should not be any different than making a version of Windows that runs on the Mac PPC. Right? In fact, if MS makes such a version of the Windows OS within VPC, they do not even need much of a translation layer at all going to the VPC application.
I think the other layers for running PC applications in the Windows OS would stay about the same as they are now.
"as a web designer, i could test my code in over a dozen different versions of web browsers ( netscape 4.x (scary), 6 and 7 and internet explorer versions 4 (just as scary) 5 and 6, opera, et al. ) on four different operating systems ( Win 95 at 256 colors and 640x480, Win 98 at thousands of colors at 800x600, and Win 2000 and XP at millions of colors at 1024x768 ) all under VPC environments on my dual 1 ghz quicksilver at my old job. need to free up cycles? no problem -- just save session and come back to it later once i do more work (or get distracted by another project)"
What operating system were you using to accomplish this? I face this dillema - I need VPC to run some Windoze only Real Estate Appraisal software. I have a 600Mhz iBook, and I find VPC unusable in OSX, but tolerable in OS9. I need portabilty, but have found VPC on even 15' TiBook unbearable.
My question is essentially two-fold: 1) Is there reason to believe/hope that MS will be willing to speed up VPC or 2) Will the new 'Books be fast enough (speed-wise and L3 size-wise (12'???)).
I should add, I am not doing anything that would require substantial use of the graphics card, only processor.
I am just curious, but does anyone know if a linux os install on vpc will have graphic card hardware support? if so, then you could start to figure out some solutions.
"as a web designer, i could test my code in over a dozen different versions of web browsers ( netscape 4.x (scary), 6 and 7 and internet explorer versions 4 (just as scary) 5 and 6, opera, et al. ) on four different operating systems ( Win 95 at 256 colors and 640x480, Win 98 at thousands of colors at 800x600, and Win 2000 and XP at millions of colors at 1024x768 ) all under VPC environments on my dual 1 ghz quicksilver at my old job. need to free up cycles? no problem -- just save session and come back to it later once i do more work (or get distracted by another project)"
What operating system were you using to accomplish this? I face this dillema - I need VPC to run some Windoze only Real Estate Appraisal software. I have a 600Mhz iBook, and I find VPC unusable in OSX, but tolerable in OS9. I need portabilty, but have found VPC on even 15' TiBook unbearable.
My question is essentially two-fold: 1) Is there reason to believe/hope that MS will be willing to speed up VPC or 2) Will the new 'Books be fast enough (speed-wise and L3 size-wise (12'???)).
I should add, I am not doing anything that would require substantial use of the graphics card, only processor.
Maclawyer
It's almost unusable on a dual gigger and impossible on a 500MHz Beige G3 in OSX, bearable on the Beige in OS9.
Not according to the conversations I had with Connectix engineers during the VPC4/5 transition. A single OS needs to own a single video card. The old Voodoo cards got around that as they were able to shunt 3d commands off the video bus into their processor, then recombine the OSes un-accellerated video which was piped back in via a pass through connector of some sort. It was fairly Rube Goldberg and completely eliminated as a possibility with the advent of OS X.
Because VPC is actually attempting to run the OS in an un-modified state, it runs a software version of an old decrepit video card which it sees as "owning". Using the Mac's hardware card runs into feedback issues of application (VPC) vs OS (Windos running within an application).
Hogwash.
They can't do it because they don't have the balls (or resourcing) to write native drivers. An OS has drivers to insulate it from the hardware, and those drivers aren't part of the OS. By implementing a special trap in their emulator to jump to PowerPC code (simple to do) that would enable them to selectively "supplement" the hardware drivers that Windows comes with. These new drivers would, when called, drop into native PowerPC code and do the work more quickly, possibly using native MacOS X services (e.g. OpenGL) to do so.
VPC took the approach of purely emulating the hardware and thus using the Microsoft drivers (written in x86) to pretend to use the fake hardware that they fake using PowerPC. This is very inefficient, but it allowed them to make it at least as stable as Windows running on the real hardware they chose to emulate. With a bit more work they could improve performance tremendously. This has been done before so the fact that the VPC guys say it can't be done is just a cop-out.
So with the blazing new speed and wall smashing power of the new G5, how will Virtual PC run on it? Will running an emulated version of windows dumb down the G5 so that it will operate on par with a wintel machine?
VPC does not emulate Windows. VPC emulates an x86 processor and a selection of peripherals. If you run Windows on VPC, Windows code is translated at runtime into PPC code and then executed. Think of BASIC at a lower level. Instead of interpreting BASIC source code into PPC code on the fly, you are effectively doing the same thing with x86 binary code. There is an upper limit on the rate at which one processor can run the interpreted binary code of another processor.
This brings us to a very important point. We are currently in version 6 of VPC. I would guess that the VPC x86 emulator engine reached its effective maximum efficiency no later than version 3. Since then, Connectix has concentrated on adding features such as sharing a single IP address with the host, multiple OS options at start-up, MacOS X dock integration, etc. It may be possible to further tweek the performance of VPC on MacOS X, but a tweek is a tweek. A tweek will not substantially improve the performance of the emulator.
Several years ago, there was an emulator for the Alpha processor that was advertised as executing x86 code at 70% of the host processor. My sense is that is about the best that one can expect from an x86 to PPC emulator. This would give you an effective speed rating of a 1.4 GHz x86 on a single 2 GHz G5.
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
okay, this is just what i don't get. the above setup i described ran fine -- not tolerable, nor blazingly fast, just fine -- on my dual gigger under os x. i ran a tight ship on my machine, updating with all necessary performance and bug patches, backing up as necessary my saved sessions onto cd or dvd (whichever was required). i had lots of different variations, but i wasn't running all of them simultaneously. for instance, the win95 256 color 640x480 netscape 4.x environment was checked RARELY for web compatibility, but i had it ready in case someone called complaining that it "wasn't working."
sure, the installs take forever -- especially so on winXP and win95 -- and you must, MUST update to the latest version of vpc BEFORE installing windows, or you'll think you're on a 386. but to say that vpc under os x is "almost unusable on a dual gigger" utterly baffles me, based on my experience.
. . . what you are suggesting is a significantly different and more expensive undertaking than VPC was ever designed to be. You really have to have access to the guts of Windows (which MS does have) and be willing to provide support for all the internal changes that would be necessary (which I doubt MS would ever sign on to) to use a OS X native driver tactic. Sinking that much work into VPC is more than would be financially viable in a market with sub $500 white boxes. . .
Maybe MS has a plan that would make it worth the effort to vastly improve VPC. What if it ran 70 percent efficiency, as was suggested above? Windows applications would work as well on a Mac as they would on a cheap PC. MS may want to convince its developers that they need not port software to OS X if VPC works this well. The upshot would be, in their plan, to get the majority of Mac users to buy VPC. In other words, MS would get paid for an OS not only on x86 PCs, but on most Macs as well. If their plan works, MS could care less if Apple gets 20 percent or more of the market. MS would still be selling their OS.
Actually, such a plan would be very beneficial to the Mac, even if it means many Mac users would be paying a Windows tax to the big gorilla. So, I hope MS does it. Over time, the applications that can really benefit from OS X will be ported, even if they do work fairly well in VPC.
Comments
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Originally posted by AirSluf
It will still be slow, but maybe not painfully slow anymore. Biggest issue is VPC has no GFx card (2D or 3D) acceleration and no amount of CPU will fix that in the foreseeable future.
Good software could fix it though. If Microsoft decided to (for whatever reason) they could implement a native PowerPC/OpenGL driver for the DirectX Windows subsystem and performance would improve very very dramatically.
Originally posted by Programmer
Good software could fix it though. If Microsoft decided to (for whatever reason) they could implement a native PowerPC/OpenGL driver for the DirectX Windows subsystem and performance would improve very very dramatically.
Seems like it would be a smart thing for MS to do.
Originally posted by Bigc
Seems like it would be a smart thing for MS to do.
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
Originally posted by Programmer
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
Seems like they could jump on the G5 bandwagon, and after all, they are in the software business and it would sell more versions of windows along with office programs and reduce their Mac development costs. I for one wouldn't mind a good Vitrual PC, there are plenty of programs I could use that are only available for Windows.
Curious though, how good could MS make VirtualPC? Could it get to be almost transparent with 90% of the speed of running native designed MS programs on the Mac?
Originally posted by Programmer
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
But does it sell fewer copies of the Windows OS? It's my impression that every time someone buys VPC, they are paying for a copy of the Windows OS. When an x86 Windows PC is sold, MS makes its money on is the OS, and of course any bundled MS software the hardware vendor installs. So, wouldn't MS make as much, maybe even more, on VPC than the sale of a Windows PC? I understand MS sells Windows at a reduced price when it is pre-installed.
Regarding your question, the most profitable strategy for MS would be to discourage developers from producing Mac software. If most Macs needed VPC, MS would be making as much or more off each Mac sold as it does each x86 PC.
Originally posted by Programmer
It sells more of their software but fewer of their platforms. Should they discourage people from buying any Macs, or should they try to disuade developers from bothering with Mac versions of their software?
I don't know any PC person who would rather run Windows on a Mac, but lots of Mac people need or want to run Windows-based apps from time to time. If MS were to optimize performance of Virtual PC, it could only be good for them and for Mac people.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
as a web designer, i could test my code in over a dozen different versions of web browsers ( netscape 4.x (scary), 6 and 7 and internet explorer versions 4 (just as scary) 5 and 6, opera, et al. ) on four different operating systems ( Win 95 at 256 colors and 640x480, Win 98 at thousands of colors at 800x600, and Win 2000 and XP at millions of colors at 1024x768 ) all under VPC environments on my dual 1 ghz quicksilver at my old job. need to free up cycles? no problem -- just save session and come back to it later once i do more work (or get distracted by another project)
honestly, if you aren't using a mac and vpc for web design, then you must either...
a.) be surrounded by a cacophony of old wintel machines to do the same thing
or
b.) just not care about what you put online.
Originally posted by AirSluf
Not according to the conversations I had with Connectix engineers during the VPC4/5 transition. A single OS needs to own a single video card. . .
I realize you may have explained it, but it went over my head. Where is my logic going wrong? I look at this problem like layers in software. An application running in OS X can make use of the graphics card, right? Okay, in this layer, VPC is just another application as far as OS X is concerned, so it can take advantage of, and use, the graphics card. That seems obvious.
Within VPC, there is a layer that takes the output of the Windows OS and converts it as necessary for VPC application interface mentioned above. This in not so obvious, and may be the point of your comments. However, it seems that MS controls the code for Windows, and it may be possible to modify the OS code as needed to make this job easier. They own the whole things, so it should not be any different than making a version of Windows that runs on the Mac PPC. Right? In fact, if MS makes such a version of the Windows OS within VPC, they do not even need much of a translation layer at all going to the VPC application.
I think the other layers for running PC applications in the Windows OS would stay about the same as they are now.
Rok said
"as a web designer, i could test my code in over a dozen different versions of web browsers ( netscape 4.x (scary), 6 and 7 and internet explorer versions 4 (just as scary) 5 and 6, opera, et al. ) on four different operating systems ( Win 95 at 256 colors and 640x480, Win 98 at thousands of colors at 800x600, and Win 2000 and XP at millions of colors at 1024x768 ) all under VPC environments on my dual 1 ghz quicksilver at my old job. need to free up cycles? no problem -- just save session and come back to it later once i do more work (or get distracted by another project)"
What operating system were you using to accomplish this? I face this dillema - I need VPC to run some Windoze only Real Estate Appraisal software. I have a 600Mhz iBook, and I find VPC unusable in OSX, but tolerable in OS9. I need portabilty, but have found VPC on even 15' TiBook unbearable.
My question is essentially two-fold: 1) Is there reason to believe/hope that MS will be willing to speed up VPC or 2) Will the new 'Books be fast enough (speed-wise and L3 size-wise (12'???)).
I should add, I am not doing anything that would require substantial use of the graphics card, only processor.
Maclawyer
Originally posted by maclawyer
My first post, so bear with me...
Rok said
"as a web designer, i could test my code in over a dozen different versions of web browsers ( netscape 4.x (scary), 6 and 7 and internet explorer versions 4 (just as scary) 5 and 6, opera, et al. ) on four different operating systems ( Win 95 at 256 colors and 640x480, Win 98 at thousands of colors at 800x600, and Win 2000 and XP at millions of colors at 1024x768 ) all under VPC environments on my dual 1 ghz quicksilver at my old job. need to free up cycles? no problem -- just save session and come back to it later once i do more work (or get distracted by another project)"
What operating system were you using to accomplish this? I face this dillema - I need VPC to run some Windoze only Real Estate Appraisal software. I have a 600Mhz iBook, and I find VPC unusable in OSX, but tolerable in OS9. I need portabilty, but have found VPC on even 15' TiBook unbearable.
My question is essentially two-fold: 1) Is there reason to believe/hope that MS will be willing to speed up VPC or 2) Will the new 'Books be fast enough (speed-wise and L3 size-wise (12'???)).
I should add, I am not doing anything that would require substantial use of the graphics card, only processor.
Maclawyer
It's almost unusable on a dual gigger and impossible on a 500MHz Beige G3 in OSX, bearable on the Beige in OS9.
Originally posted by AirSluf
Not according to the conversations I had with Connectix engineers during the VPC4/5 transition. A single OS needs to own a single video card. The old Voodoo cards got around that as they were able to shunt 3d commands off the video bus into their processor, then recombine the OSes un-accellerated video which was piped back in via a pass through connector of some sort. It was fairly Rube Goldberg and completely eliminated as a possibility with the advent of OS X.
Because VPC is actually attempting to run the OS in an un-modified state, it runs a software version of an old decrepit video card which it sees as "owning". Using the Mac's hardware card runs into feedback issues of application (VPC) vs OS (Windos running within an application).
Hogwash.
They can't do it because they don't have the balls (or resourcing) to write native drivers. An OS has drivers to insulate it from the hardware, and those drivers aren't part of the OS. By implementing a special trap in their emulator to jump to PowerPC code (simple to do) that would enable them to selectively "supplement" the hardware drivers that Windows comes with. These new drivers would, when called, drop into native PowerPC code and do the work more quickly, possibly using native MacOS X services (e.g. OpenGL) to do so.
VPC took the approach of purely emulating the hardware and thus using the Microsoft drivers (written in x86) to pretend to use the fake hardware that they fake using PowerPC. This is very inefficient, but it allowed them to make it at least as stable as Windows running on the real hardware they chose to emulate. With a bit more work they could improve performance tremendously. This has been done before so the fact that the VPC guys say it can't be done is just a cop-out.
Originally posted by Baron von Smiley
So with the blazing new speed and wall smashing power of the new G5, how will Virtual PC run on it? Will running an emulated version of windows dumb down the G5 so that it will operate on par with a wintel machine?
VPC does not emulate Windows. VPC emulates an x86 processor and a selection of peripherals. If you run Windows on VPC, Windows code is translated at runtime into PPC code and then executed. Think of BASIC at a lower level. Instead of interpreting BASIC source code into PPC code on the fly, you are effectively doing the same thing with x86 binary code. There is an upper limit on the rate at which one processor can run the interpreted binary code of another processor.
This brings us to a very important point. We are currently in version 6 of VPC. I would guess that the VPC x86 emulator engine reached its effective maximum efficiency no later than version 3. Since then, Connectix has concentrated on adding features such as sharing a single IP address with the host, multiple OS options at start-up, MacOS X dock integration, etc. It may be possible to further tweek the performance of VPC on MacOS X, but a tweek is a tweek. A tweek will not substantially improve the performance of the emulator.
Several years ago, there was an emulator for the Alpha processor that was advertised as executing x86 code at 70% of the host processor. My sense is that is about the best that one can expect from an x86 to PPC emulator. This would give you an effective speed rating of a 1.4 GHz x86 on a single 2 GHz G5.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Originally posted by Bigc
It's almost unusable on a dual gigger...
okay, this is just what i don't get. the above setup i described ran fine -- not tolerable, nor blazingly fast, just fine -- on my dual gigger under os x. i ran a tight ship on my machine, updating with all necessary performance and bug patches, backing up as necessary my saved sessions onto cd or dvd (whichever was required). i had lots of different variations, but i wasn't running all of them simultaneously. for instance, the win95 256 color 640x480 netscape 4.x environment was checked RARELY for web compatibility, but i had it ready in case someone called complaining that it "wasn't working."
sure, the installs take forever -- especially so on winXP and win95 -- and you must, MUST update to the latest version of vpc BEFORE installing windows, or you'll think you're on a 386. but to say that vpc under os x is "almost unusable on a dual gigger" utterly baffles me, based on my experience.
Originally posted by AirSluf
. . . what you are suggesting is a significantly different and more expensive undertaking than VPC was ever designed to be. You really have to have access to the guts of Windows (which MS does have) and be willing to provide support for all the internal changes that would be necessary (which I doubt MS would ever sign on to) to use a OS X native driver tactic. Sinking that much work into VPC is more than would be financially viable in a market with sub $500 white boxes. . .
Maybe MS has a plan that would make it worth the effort to vastly improve VPC. What if it ran 70 percent efficiency, as was suggested above? Windows applications would work as well on a Mac as they would on a cheap PC. MS may want to convince its developers that they need not port software to OS X if VPC works this well. The upshot would be, in their plan, to get the majority of Mac users to buy VPC. In other words, MS would get paid for an OS not only on x86 PCs, but on most Macs as well. If their plan works, MS could care less if Apple gets 20 percent or more of the market. MS would still be selling their OS.
Actually, such a plan would be very beneficial to the Mac, even if it means many Mac users would be paying a Windows tax to the big gorilla. So, I hope MS does it. Over time, the applications that can really benefit from OS X will be ported, even if they do work fairly well in VPC.