To Virtual PC or not to Virtual PC...

[lurk]

In my day job I have to support OS X, Linux and Windows. I used to do that with a 800Mhz Athlon running Linux and VMWare running Win98. O.K. so windows support is more of a token effort

The problem is that the Linux box reciently lost its head which is not a problem for most applications except for VMWare. It is unusably slow over the network. So I was wondering if Virtual PC may be the answer?

Specificially I have 667MHz TiBook with 1G of ram (it is the older model not the DVI one) and I was wondering what sort of performance I could expect? Is the new XP version usable? How about Linux?

Thanks for the help!

-Eric

[filmadscientist]

Hi Eric,

I am using VP in day to day development work for webstuff.
So the performance of the newest updated version 5.0.4 is not bad. I mean depends on if you use 9 or X.
In 9 I must say that the performance is better than I have seen on some "native" win boxes.
In X though there is a pretty dominant decrease in speed ( like even opening IE or similar applications).
I am running a 667 MHZ PB with 768 MB RAM to give you a better overview.

So I wold say it really depends what you will use this Virtual Pc for. If it is supposed to be a testing machine I would recommend it. For development as I do ( Interdev and SQL) I wouldnt recommend it , at least not in X.

SeeYa,
Fil

[strobe]

If you have a PC which you run all the time you should consider using VNC.

[lurk]

Thanks for the performance info. I will be using it to do windows builds and testing. If I can set up a cross compiler on Linux I won't bother to do any of the builds there if things are too slow.

This may actually work out pretty well. I may be able to argue that I really need a 23 inch cinima display instead of a Dell to run Windows

Too bad my TiBook won't drive the display. Well I guess I just need to ask for the 2x1.25GHz Power Mac to drive it. I do need the horse power to run Virtual PC after all

I don't think managment will go after it either

P.S. As for VNC running VMWare over X as I am now is bassically equivalent. I also was not smart enough to be able to... (bling... little light turns on...) Run the VNC xserver on the Linux box and run VMWare there, then the vmware traffic is local and I may ne able to get better results from VNC's networking to the mac instead of X's. OK so I can also try that.