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Hi, my name's Phil and I have a PC in my office. Yes, that's right, you read it...a PC! It's been three weeks since my last confession and I think the time is right for us to all to come and realise that what has us waking up in a cold sweat at 3 am screaming "Nooooo!", is in fact a reality. We live in a cross-platform world.

So why do I have a PC sitting behind me in my office? Is it for the shock factor (and trust me, it happens) when someone walks in, sees me sitting at my Mac, starts talking to me and then does a double take as they spot the PC and says "What the..?". Well, actually, it's because I need it. And at home, where I don't have a PC, Virtual PC is a viable option for work that I have to do.

Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx.	VPC 7 with Windows XP Home ($440 + GST) or Windows XP Pro ($470 + GST)
Software/Hardware Requirements	700 MHz PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor. Mac OS X  10.2.8, 10.3 or 10.4.1+. G5 processor requires Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4.1+ 512 MB of RAM 3 GB hard drive 1024 x 768+ screen resolution
Available from	Buyers Guide

So do I really need a PC at work? Absolutely...and for a number of reasons. First of all, I work with staff that use a quiz tool we have a site license for, that hooks into WebCT (our University's Learning Management System) that is a PC product. Sure, there are ways to make the quizzes on a Mac, but that's not the point..I need to know how to use the program to instruct staff on its use.

I'm also coordinating a trial of the Macromedia Breeze presentation and meeting system at Massey during this semester. Breeze 5 is a superb product and virtually all of it works on a Mac. But unfortunately, the extension that goes into PowerPoint to create multimedia presentations is PC only.

Next, there is the most important thing to me about good web design and multimedia. I want to make things that work for everyone. I've always believed that the Mac is the best platform to produce cross-platform multimedia on, but you've still got to test what you produce on a variety of systems. My PC at work gets fired up on a regular basis to test out a CD, view a web page or a video clip. Every web designer will tell you, that no matter how you try, differences between platforms and browsers will always occur and need to be taken into consideration.

I created a site recently at work that I was very proud of. It looked great on every browser on my Mac (8 in total at the moment) but when I fired up the PC, it was a different matter. Things needed to be fixed. CSS tags needed to be altered and certain quirks in certain browsers needed to be taken into account.

So, on a day at home, desperate to try out a couple of pages on a PC but still keen to make my house as un-PC (oh, that's such a lame pun) as possible, the kind folk at Microsoft gave me a copy of Virtual PC 7 (newly updated to version 7.2) to try out.

I remember the first time I saw Windows running on a Mac. It was in London, at the Mac Users Group meeting many years ago. There was this group of people huddled around a laptop and they were viewing what I think was the product Real PC. Even then (and I'm sad to report the attitude continues to this day) many people seemed to think it was a way of cheating your computer into letting you have two powerful operating systems in one. It's not quite like that.

The reality of the matter is that when you run Virtual PC, you are running an operating system (Mac OS X) that is running an application (Virtual PC) that is running an operating system (Windows XP for example) that is then running any PC application that you launch.

Does it sound complex? Of course it is!!

There's a misconception that buying Virtual PC will allow you to painlessly use Windows on your Mac and take advantage of all the huge PC programs out there that don't appear to be coming to the Mac. Maybe you are desperate to play some grunty game that just hasn't been ported to the Mac yet, but are so keen that you want to get Virtual PC so you can play to your hearts content?

Wake up and smell the start menu!

The reality is that you won't be able to achieve those sorts of things on Virtual PC. Heck, Microsoft would probably agree with that statement too. They're keen to point out that the product is not intended to be a substitute for a genuine PC, but a way of getting access to a Windows environment, and to running some PC programs, without trying to max out the processing power of your Mac.

Installation
I really like the packaging that came with VPC and I thought the simplicity of the manual and the fold out installation pamphlet was excellent. I was a bit surprised to find on opening the internal case, that there was one CD in a holder and one loose....even more surprised during the install process to find the one CD on the holder actually had another one hidden underneath....three in total.

I started to panic when I first read that a wizard was going to guide me through the installation process. With thoughts of "Oh no, not Mr Paper Clip" in my head, I ran the installer. The installation process promotes a 1-2-3 approach to installing Virtual PC. I have no problems with that, but I always find installers that cause a restart (in this case, after step 1) slightly disconcerting. Would the wizard be there when I rebooted to help me on my way?

Well, yes it was...but so were four separate errors messages that popped up at that time. I managed to get rid of three of them, but even after the second restart I was told to do, one error about network switching remained...despite the fact that the Microsoft site said a restart would resolve the situation.

I liked the fact that the installer gave me the option of where I wanted to save the file that Windows get installed into. Because this is likely to end up a large file, I was pleased I could save it to a separate partition.

The rest of the installation process to get Windows XP booting was painless and took around 15 minutes. At that stage, you're in to setting up Windows, so be prepared for some time. Not that Windows takes ages, but that you're effectively setting up a brand new operating system on a new (but virtual) computer.

Virtual PC allows you to put a Start Menu in the Macintosh dock, but I found that a curious idea. I can see the point...a fast way to boot Virtual PC and your Windows environment, but it provided too many options for me and, if I'm being picky, seemed a little bit too much of a PC intrusion into my Mac world.

The rest of my first evening with VPC 7 was spent doing three things. First, updating VPC to version 7.0.2. Next, and the most important, installing some anti-virus software. You are running a Windows environment and it can be attacked, even if it is sitting on a Mac. I've used Grisoft's AVC free edition software with friends for years, so I decided to go with that (free.grisoft.com).

Finally, I needed to run all the updates to the Windows XP environment that the pop-up bubbles in the menu bar (that drive me crazy) kept telling me I needed to install.

Running applications
I should point out that I tested VPC on a new 20-inch G5 iMac, running at 2 Ghz. It's important to realise that if you are going to expect good performance, then you need a powerful computer to use VPC with. You could also consider another operating system such as Windows 2000, as the newer XP will obviously require more grunt from your machine as all newer systems tend to ask for.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised with the performance. I expected really bad delays, but instead, some things such as the speed at which software installed, surprised me. Don't get me wrong, nothing was flying along here, but I wasn't expecting it to and wasn't faced with delays that made me impatient.

There's a number oft things you have to keep in mind when wondering why VPC is performing at the speed it is. For example, I had started by stretching the screen out as big as possible on my monitor. That was great to see, but because of the power required for VPC to redraw the XP screen on a regular basis, I not only noticed a slow down in performance, but blocks appeared where windows or icons had been as VPC struggled to redraw the screen. Shrinking the screen size down to something smaller improved the performance.

One of the first things I tried to do was to install and use the PC software that came with my mobile phone. After an hour of playing, I resorted to using the XP help system that told me just to open up the "Bluetooth Devices" control panel. Problem is, there wasn't one!

I've read on the net that it is possible to get the bluetooth part working with your bluetooth card on the Mac, but I'm yet to figure out how to get it to work.

Other applications like Office worked perfectly and I was able to add in a PC-only Breeze component that plugs in to PowerPoint and use the whole thing to create a presentation, including telling PowerPoint running under VPC to connect to the server that we have the Breeze system running on and publish the presentation. Something I simply can't do under a Mac operating system.

So why use VPC?
I mentioned the trial of Macromedia Breeze. I'm out and about working with staff within the University on a number of occasions, including giving presentations. One of the things I decided to try out was to install VPC on my iBook, but also decided to slip the version of Windows I installed back down to Windows 2000.

I was again pleasantly surprised by the performance on the laptop. I can't wait to be doing a presentation with my iBook running and have Windows open in full-screen. Here I'll be with a nice Apple logo on the lid and people will be looking at a screen showing Windows. I think it'll be a laugh if they get a bit confused.

Being able to do this has solved a huge problem for me. In order to show the one aspect of Breeze that is PC-only in any presentation, I've previously had to have second PC computer handy. Imagine how hard it is to prepare your whole presentation for a venue, plug in your iBook and then say "Oh, but can you have a PC laptop there too as I need that for a few moments?". Virtual PC solves this issue easily.

The other thing we have to face up to, is that whether we like it or not, there are far more applications on the PC than on the Mac. Personally, I'm not that bothered by most of the superfluous programs on the PC that I can't get my hands on in Mac form, but let's take a specific example again about how VPC becomes useful.

To show video via the Breeze server, Macromedia requires that you put the video in to either Flash Video (FLV) format or standard Flash (SWF) format. For me, to support staff using Breeze and wanting to make FLV movie clips, that has meant we've had to invest in a copy of Sorenson Squeeze, at around $400 USD.

But! Over the last weekend, I discovered two PC-only freeware applications that convert many different types of movie files into FLV format. Not only was I able to provide staff with this software, I was able to try it out myself under VPC.

I was also working with some FLV files for a client over the weekend and was getting very frustrated that some important metadata wasn't embedding itself in to the FLVs that I was creating. Answer...I found a PC only application that could do it for me.

Now don't get me wrong...I'm not saying I can't do without a PC, but the ability to fire up an obscure PC utility that solves an issue quickly, has saved me time and expense. It has also allowed me to advise friends and colleagues of software that I may have never had the chance to use previously or have knowledge in. In my job and with my friends, being able to recommend software to them that I previously may have only just seen in action elsewhere, is a great thing.

Summary
I have found a handful of minor applications that appear to not like virtual PC. Spywareblaster is a good example of this, with their forums suggesting there is an issue with their program and VPC. One of the FLV encoders I tried also appeared to work poorly but seemed fine on a "proper' PC. So keep in mind that it may not always be a case of things working fine, but there are alternatives to these programs and I'm not aware of any major issue with an important application that you might want to run on the PC.

In the end, Virtual PC is what you would expect it to be....a way of fooling your Mac in to pretending it's something else. Those who expect that using VPC means that you'll have two computers in one, will be disappointed. If you really need two hard working computers that function as you'd expect, buy two hard working computers.

For those like me that like the convenience of being able to fire up a PC for the odd occasion, who needs to understand PC applications to support others or who want to test websites or multimedia they make to ensure they really do work and display properly for all, then Virtual PC is an excellent application for these purposes.

Overcoming installation glitches and the fact that it isn't always going to work in the way a real PC would, Virtual PC provide an excellent opportunity to have a second working environment on your computer (without having a second computer) for things you sometimes need to do outside of the Mac world.

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a guest said: October 09, 2005   Votes: +0

	http://www.macwindows.com/
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October 09, 2005
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