Follow Up--Virtual PC 4.0

Yesterday we posted our initial experience with the latest version of Virtual PC from Connectix. While many (most?, all?) Mac users are not especially prone to reading manuals, doing so would have helped us out. For example, we had trouble trying to expand a Virtual PC v3.0 drive image (with Win98 on it) with the v4.0 utility. Well, the v4.0 manual clearly states on page 9 that only drive images made with v4.0 can be made expandable. So we made an expandable drive image with v4.0 and transferred our applications from the fixed size v3.0 disk image. This new feature is excellent since the disk image only used the disk space needed to house the installed applications but left plenty of potential room for future applications.

Unfortunately, we encountered another problem. We could not get v4.0 to recognize the CD-ROM drive to read some drivers off our Win98 CD that were needed for the new Sound Blaster card and two other new "hardware" items installed by v4.0. Win98 would only let us select a lettered drive (Win98's "My Computer" showed the CD drive to be the "E" drive) but VPC v4.0 does not assign a letter to the CD drive. Then, with the Win98 CD still in our G4 Cube's CD drive, we could not shut VPC down because we got an error message stating that the CD drive was accessing the CD for other applications and could not be ejected. Nothing was accessing the CD drive as far as we could determine.

What about running VPC 4 on Mac OS X? We generally recommend against buying any new or updated Mac software that it not carbonized for Mac OS X to avoid having to buy it twice in a short period of time. From Jeff Hubert's conversation with Connectix, "...VPC 4.0.x will be compatible with OS X when it is available. He said they were hard at work on the upgrade and that once OS X ships VPC 4.0.x would be compatible. Also, he mentioned that one of the features of VPC 4.0 under OS X is that it will take advantage of MP in a dual processor G4."

Look for a full hands-on review of Virtual PC v4.0 in the near future.