Hands-On Review of Virtual PC 4
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Hands-On Review:
Virtual PC 4 with Windows ME By Bill Fox Connectix. Price: $199 list Pros: Powerful new features, easy and trouble-free installation, works well, indispensable for many Mac users Cons: None. Rating: Outstanding, 5 out of 5 Exclamation Points: Connectix just released Virtual PC 4 (4.0.1 is the latest version), their Wintel emulator for Apple's Macintosh, retail packaged with Windows ME and Windows 2000 ($249). There are also retail packages for PC-DOS ($99) and Windows 98 ($199) versions. Virtual PC 4 can also be obtained as a downloadable upgrader ($69) of previous versions of Virtual PC. Connectix has added several valuable features and claims that it runs up to twice as fast as previous versions. Virtual PC 1.0 saved many Mac users' bacon when it came out. As an example, an organization that we know well was in the process of switching from a Novell Netware network to a Windows NT 4.x network. Their IT set up was (and still is) principally Wintels with Macs and Mac-clones being about 20 percent of the client computers. Their IT staff was careful about ensuring that file sharing and printing would work after the transition for all platforms, albeit more slowly for the Macs. However, at the same time other parts of the organization ignorantly [I think I'm being kind by not using the stupid or evil adjective.] contracted for several proprietary Windows-only applications that were essential for personnel management, project tracking and "strategic" planning rather than buying off the shelf a crossplatform application like Filemaker Pro or developing web-based applications. Sound familiar? Fortunately, all of the Windows-only applications worked fine with Virtual PC. Most, but not all, of them are now web based so Virtual PC is still required but there are still Macs in the organization doing what only they do best. At Macs Only! we use Virtual PC for a variety of tasks, including checking to see how web pages look to Wintel users, to check out sites that are not friendly to Mac web browsers, to examine Windows versions of crossplatform applications, to sign up for some things that require a Wintel and to test an occasional application that has no Mac counterpart. The Windows ME version of Virtual PC 4.0 is the latest so we took it for a spin. First, a couple of words about the Evil Empire's latest consumer operating system. Windows ME has been widely condemned by the Wintel press as exceeding difficult to install as an upgrade (aren't all Windows upgrades?) and not providing much more for the money. Well, I "like" Windows ME better than the previous Microsoft offerings because it comes even closer to the Mac OS in ease of use. Simple networking and multimedia features are much simpler to set up and use but still fall short of the Mac OS. On the down side, Windows ME uses more memory and is slower on the same computer system than its predecessor consumer versions. What You Get The Windows ME version of Virtual PC 4 includes two CDs, a printed Virtual PC manual, a printed Windows ME "Quick Start Guide", a Windows ME Certificate of Authenticity card and a serial number card. We recommend that you copy the product key and serial numbers into the manual since the cards are easy to drop accidentally or otherwise misplace. Disk 1 contains the Virtual PC 4 Installer, a Read Me file and a PDF file of the manual. The installer on Disk 1 includes Virtual PC Application, the Windows ME disk image and an "Extras" folder. Only Disk 1 is needed during the installation process. Disk 2 contains additional Windows ME system files that may be needed by a Windows application or to replace a bad file. It is not needed for the standard installation. Virtual PC 4's 136-page printed manual is very high quality with lots of illustrations and screenshots. The 11 chapters and three appendices cover everything from how to use Virtual PC, how to use the various Windows and PC-DOS operating systems and the new features in version 4 to specialized chapters on networking, AppleScript and the Red Hat Linux operating system, currently available only as version 3 according to Connectix. There is a short 2-page FAQ chapter and an appendix covering how to install a variety of other supported operating systems: Windows 3.1, 95, and NT 4, IBM OS/2 v4.0, NeXT OPENSTEP and Red Hat Linux. Among the primary new features in Virtual PC 4 according to the manual are: Faster execution: Virtual PC emulates a Pentium II CPU rather than a Pentium and is G4 Altivec or velocity Engine aware. Multiple virtual machines run simultaneously: Multiple PCs can be launched at the same time and each runs in their own window. The number is only limited by your Mac's RAM. Expandable drive images: Drive images start small, basically the size of the data on them, and can expand up to 127 GB as more data is added. This is one of the best features of version 4 in our view. Bootable CDs: One can insert a bootable CD in the CD drive and Virtual PC 4 can launch it as a virtual machine off the CD instead of a disk image on the hard drive. Custom RAM allocation with higher limits: The RAM allocation for each virtual machine can be changed independently and while they are running up to 512 MB. There's also a streamlined interface, a listing of the virtual machines available, new preference settings and Help files. The major feature left out of Virtual PC 4 is support for 3-D accelerator cards. We always thought that the inclusion of this capability was questionable in the first place since no matter how fast a Mac you have, Virtual PC could never play fast action 3-D games to anyone's satisfaction. We are not sure, however, if this significantly aided in the use PC-only CAD applications. However, we can't imagine the performance being satisfactory in a professional environment when compared with a Mac compatible application or using a PC. We know that other reviews do not agree with us on this point. The Virtual PC application itself has also grown much larger. Virtual PC 1.0 is a little over 800 K. Version 3.0.3A is 1.3 MB and Version 4 has grown to 2.7 MB. Fortunately, the expandable disk image capability partially compensates for Virtual PC's growth. Installation and Use Installation is a snap. Insert Disk 1 in your CD drive, click the installer, click through the license dialog boxes, select easy install and click the "Install" button. We test installed Virtual PC 4 with its Windows ME disk image on a 450 MHz G4 Cube on a Windows NT network, Power Mac 533 DP on a wired ethernet network and 400 MHz PowerBook 2000 (FireWire) on an AirPort v1.3 network without a hitch. All three computers were running Mac OS 9.1. Also installed were a Read Me file, a PDF file of the manual, an Extras folder and a Scripts folder. The Extras folder contains items needed for installing other OS's and upgrades to older Windows disk images--we have Windows 95 disk images from previous Virtual PC versions that needed upgrading. The Scripts folder contains a number of AppleScript scripts. The first thing we did with each computer was to select "Windows Update" from Windows ME "Start" menu and download a ton of Microsoft updates and security patches for Windows ME and the included Internet Explorer. All networking just worked upon installation of Virtual PC 4 without further configuration. Connectix has this down pat now, a tremendous accomplishment. Then we backed up and updated our Windows 95 disk images with the appropriate updater included in the "Extras" folder. No problem was encountered here either. [As an aside, a colleague had enormous problems trying to update a Windows 98 disk image with the downloaded upgrade version of Virtual PC 4. A number of workarounds were needed to complete the process and he still has problems with CDs. His Windows 95 disk image upgrade went normally. However, we are not in a position to judge independently the downloadable upgrade version on Windows 98.] Both Windows 95 and Windows ME work well on all three computers. Windows 95 does seem a bit faster on Virtual PC 4 than on v3.0.3A. Windows ME is okay speedwise but is a bit sluggish as compared with Windows 95 which is actully quite snappy with Virtual PC 4 on the Power Mac 533 DP. Other reviews have published Wintel benchmarks that have documented that Virtual PC 4 is faster at those benchmarks. We decided not to repeat them here. We simply timed three "real world" operations with Virtual PC 4 and 3.0.3A on a 450 MHz Power Mac G4 Cube. The operations are: 1) launch Windows and record the time it takes to reach the network login dialog box; 2) launch Internet Explorer 5.5 from a running virtual machine and record the time it takes until the home page is fully loaded; and 3) load Sitelink.net's QuickClicks Site Statisitics table. Each operation was performed four times and the last 3 were averaged to the whole second. Here are the results in seconds for Windows 95 with Virtual PC 3.0.3A and version 4 plus Windows ME with version 4:
We don't see a remarkable difference between v3.0.3A and v4.0.1 in these operations which are representative of the ones that we frequently perform with Virtual PC as noted above. If anything is remarkable, version 4 took longer to launch a virtual machine from the application's new List Window than version 3.0.3A did from the actual application. The other operations we frequently perform with Virtual PC do not require any more speed per se than the speed that the Mac has delivered with past versions of Virtual PC. This may not be true for everyone, of course. Conclusions Connectix has delivered an outstanding update to an application that is essential to many Mac users. The new features, particularly the expandable hard drive and multiple virtual machine running capability, are welcome additions. Virtual PC 4 installs quickly and as easily as most any application and, given its underlying complexity, this is a gigantic feat. Even networking worked right after finishing the installation and set up on all three configurations: Windows NT, small wired ethernet and AirPort. We didn't see a speed increase in the simple tests we performed on a G4 Cube but we have no reason to not believe the Wintel benchmarks conducted by others which show substantial speed increases for version 4 over version 3. Virtual PC has been one of our essential applications since v1.0 and we welcome v4.0 with its new features. Mac OS X secrets revealed right here! |
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March 14, 2001
