TIP--Fixing Virtual PC's Speed in Panther

We have used Virtual PC, orginally by Connectix and now by Microsoft, since it first came out. It saved our Mac bacon in the workplace many times over in the early years of the IT group converting to Windows NT Server from Novell and the mass move to Windows 95 as their platform of choice. Company software applications were rewritten in Microsoft Access and other proprietary Microsoftian formats that only Windows 95/98/2000 could use. A modest group of us managed to hang onto our Macs by using Virtual PC and Connectix's other major product, DoubleTalk. We certainly hope the founders of Connectix got rich--it is their due.

Microsoft now owns Virtual PC and all of the applications in our day-job workplace are web-based. They are largely platform agnostic thanks, at least in part, to a very strong and broad resistance to replacing Netscape/Mozilla as the standard web browser with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and its evil-inspired proprietary quirks. Due to this, Mac OS X and a resurgence of various Unixes due to security issues, we no longer use Virtual PC except for a few applications where there are no alternatives to Windows. One those exceptions is Garmin's MapSource software for our Street Pilot III and eTrex Vista GPS equipment.

Garmin steadfastly refuses to produce Mac-compatible software. This was probably a sane market decision quite awhile ago but we hope that Garmin will rethink this at some time in the near future. While software like MacGPS Pro can import maps, geographical data and work with waypoints and the like in Mac OS X, one still needs Virtual PC and a USB-Serial adapter to communicate with your Garmin GPS unit.

Now to the point of this note. Since the last time we used Virtual PC to update our GPS units, Virtual PC has gone from v5.0.x to 6.1.1 and Mac OS X has gone from 10.2.x to 10.3.2. When we fired up Virtual PC v5.0.4 and launched Windows XP, it was incredibly slow and choked to a halt before getting to the desktop. A similar thing happened with our Windows ME and Windows 95 vitual machines. They got a little further, i.e. to the desktop, but both were excruciatingly slow and ground to a halt while trying to populate the desktop with application icons.

At first, we thought this must be due to VPC 5.0.4 being incompatible with Panther (Mac OS X 10.3.2) and begrudgingly bought Microsoft's v6.1 Upgrade. The box says VPC 6.1 needs 10.2.6 or higher but does not mention Panther. It didn't help. In fact, after the upgrade our Windows ME and 95 virtual machines wouldn't even launch and XP was even slower, hardly showing more than a couple of frames of the splash screen before crapping out. The recent VPC 6.1.1 updater didn't help either.

After hours of hunting down and trashing every vestige of VPC, which is extremely hard to do by the way, and reinstalling it and the virtual machines on two differnt computers with the same results, we finally did something smart. We went to MacWindows.com and read their reader notes on VPC 6.1. Sure enough, some people had written that they also had the same problem with VPC and Panther but disconcertingly some wrote back that they did not. Some wrote that they had fixed the slowness problem by eliminating this and that conflicting software, none of which we had installed on either computer...until we found one who mentioned Safari. His claim was that somehow running Safari "poisoned" things for VPC under Panther. His suggested fix was a reboot of the Mac and to not launch Safari until one was finished with Virtual PC.

We almost never reboot Mac OS X and use Safari almost exclusively on all of our computers. Safari is even automatically launched at login. We were highly skeptical but desperate so we gave it a try. We rebooted and launched VPC without launching Safari or any application for that matter. Amazingly and thankfully, it worked! In fact, VPC 6.1.1 running Windows XP, ME or 95 is much zippier than VPC 5.0.4 was under Jaguar (10.2.x).

But the scientist in us asked if we could cause a repeat of the problem by launching and running Safari. Nope. After launching and running Safari for a few hours, all of the three Windows virtual machines still launched and ran spritely on our 1 GHZ 17" PowerBook G4 under VPC 6.1.1. We have yet to have a repeat of the extreme slowness but we'll try again after a few days and weeks of running Safari.

So there you have it, rebooting our Macs and launching Virtual PC before launching any other application cured our problem of extremely slow running of VPC under Panther, Mac OS X 10.3.2. But YMMV since we could not cause a repeat of the problem.