A question for Mac users

ed_h

Hi
I would like to hear from Mac users who have or are now using virtual PC, is it as slow as i have been led to believe? would my Mac now become an easy target for PC nasties by installing it? I need it or something similar to run a financial program thats not available for Macintosh.
Cheers, Ed

colourbox

Small apps may run acceptably in Virtual PC. Large apps may be an exercise in utter frustration with long delays, and serious graphics apps are simply not usable in any practical way. Your financial app may be OK. Of course, RAM and CPU speed will enter into it. The system demands are on a par with Photoshop. You'll probably want to be running at least a 1GHz G4. You might already know that if you have a Mac with an Intel CPU, you can't run Virtual PC, and you wouldn't want to...try Parallels instead for a much faster Windows experience.

There isn't much risk to your Mac. The way it works is the entire PC is contained within its own disk image document. That makes it easy to copy, back up, and restore, except for the fact that the disk image is going to be a few GB in size to hold the usual contents of a Windows hard disk. If a virus were to infect Windows, and you had a backup copy of the disk image, you should be able to throw out the infected image and simply use the pre-infection backup. Viruses written to exploit Windows can't cross over and run on the Mac, but there are a few edge cases. The Shared Folders feature allows Windows to see folders on the Mac. If Windows gets a virus that trashes files, and you share one of your Mac folders, the virus may trash files in that folder, but probably can't affect anything outside the shared folder. If you're only sharing one or two little transfer folders that are normally almost empty, you're pretty safe. Also, there is always the possibility of moving Word and Excel file across platforms with their cross-platform macro viruses, but that risk already exists without Virtual PC if you receive those files in e-mails.

JohnR

Which mac do you have?

I run VPC with XP on my dual 2ghz powermac G5 with 4GB of ram and it runs not too bad. I won't be running anything like games or photoshop on it but for financial software (I'm guessing here since to me it is probably something with just numbers and not graphic intensive) it should be fine.

Like colourbox said, you have no worries about all that spyware/virus/etc.

Andy

ed_h wrote:

Hi
I would like to hear from Mac users who have or are now using virtual PC, is it as slow as i have been led to believe?

Dog slow. Molasses.

The good news is, when you get a new Mac, it'll have an Intel chip in it, and you can run Parallels instead of Virtual PC, and life is wonderful. I run PC and Mac at the same time on my Mac Pro, and it's a joy to use. Fast as all get out on the Winders side.

ed_h

Thank you Colourbox, John and Andy for taking the time to respond to my query on Virtual PC. until it was explained to me in detail by Colourbox my biggest concern was the security issues which for the most part has been laid to rest, operating speed was also an issue. My present Mac is a 1.42 GHz G4. I can see a trade off with my wife as she's not particularly happy with her Ibook leaving the door open for me to have a good look at a new Intel chipped Mac. with parallels. I wonder if she would noticed it being bundled with a new D40.
Thanks again, Ed