VMaxx.net

[MacDaddy]

I use Virtual PC & VMWare everyday. My overall preference, by a longshot, is VMWare. I use Virtual PC when I have to or when nothing else is available. When my subscription to MSDN arrived and I had time to go through it, I noticed that there was a copy of Virtual PC 7.x for the Macintosh. I thought this was the greatest thing possible. I have virual machines of everything on every platform except for the Mac.

Loading of Virtual PC was eas and uneventful. When I create a new virtual machine on thing that was annoying is that you can only initially format your virtual drive with FAT 16, 32, or nothing. There was no way I was going to format a drive for XP with FAT, so I chose nothing. When XP loads you can format the drive then.

When loading the guest operating system, the Mac is strained. I assumed it had a lot to do. Unfortunately the strain doesn't end when the guest operating system is finished loading. I noticed everything in the virtual XP box was extremely slow. I didn't think too much of it. I thought patches were being deployed, Norton was being deployed & updated or even a full scan was being ran. Unfortunately none of this was the case. It turns out that Virtual PC on the Mac is famous for running the guest CPU as well as the host CPU @ 100%. There is article after article on this at [url=http://www.macwindows.com[/url]. There were only a few suggestions to make it run faster. The first was to disable the USB on the guest OS. I did this first and rebooted hoping there would be a big difference. There wasn't. The other big suggestion was to tweak the XP box. Shutting off anything that wasn't necessary. This is crap. I have around 50 virtual machines on VMWare and Virtal PC on Windows & Linux. Most of them servers doing some heavy crunching. None of them even come a fraction of the CPU usage as a guest OS doing nothing on the Mac.

I have only loaded the XP OS on Virtual PC on the Mac. I will try putting Win2k on there and see if it is any better. Luckily my Mac is basically a toy and not used for any real purpose or I would be extremely pissed off, especially if I had actually purchased Virtual PC as a stand alone product instead of coming with MSDN.

What a RIP OFF!