Anyone tried OED under Virtual PC?

I

iljavanroon

Registered
Hi Everyone, this is my first post here, thanks in advance for taking time to look at it.

I switched to Mac a few months ago, never looked back. There is, however, one thing I dearly miss: the Oxford English Dictionary. For you barbarians out there who do not know what it is http://www.oed.com :)

The OED has, unfortunately, decided not to make a Mac-version, but they do have a Windows-version. Has anyone tried to install it on a Mac using Virtual PC? Does it 'work' at all, as in "does it operate at an acceptable speed"?

Sigh. I love my Mac. But boy do I miss my dictionary:) If it works, I am out to get Virtual PC tomorrow...
 
I have not tried it, but it very probably will work with VPC. Whether or not the speed will be acceptable is entirely subjective. That is dependent on the speed of the processor, preferably processors -- plural; the amount of RAM that you can dedicate to VPC while it is running, preferably 512 MB; and the speed of your hard drive. Even with fast dual processors it will still be relatively slow compared to your Mac.

I have become enamored of the freeware OmniDictionary. It uses a variety of internet dictionary sources including Webster's International and the definitions are excellent. It has the added benefit of working as an OS X Service and is available from the service menu in any cocoa or service aware carbon application. With a high speed internet connection the definitions seem almost instantaneous and if your spelling is off it will offer close options to choose from. I recommend it highly.
 
The Oxford English Dictionary will be part of your system once you upgrade to Tiger. Beautiful thing, really - although I with they'd include MANY more dictionaries, German ones, among them - working beautifully. You can set it up so that in ANY application, you just right-click (or ctrl-click) a word and run it through the dict, and it opens a small tabbed popup with the definition. Right now, there's Oxford Dictionary and Oxford Thesaurus in there, nothing else. But I hope those are user-installable in some way...
 
Hiya -- I know that the OED is rather a different breed of cat than the dictionary (which is quite nice) built into Tiger. I have Virtual PC 6.1 running under Tiger, and the OED version 2.0 installs fine on Windows 2000 in Virtual PC, though the cd verification process is slower even than with a regular PC -- which is really slow. There is an upgrade coming to version 3.1 of the OED which you can get for just $40 at thedictionarystore.com, which personally I think is a great deal. With the upgrade (which is supposed to ship around June 1, but has been delayed in the past) you will be able to copy the dictionary to your (virtual) hard drive, and will only have to put the disc in for verification every month, I think. Of course, if you already have version 3.0 all this information about the upgrade is not much good to you! But I wanted to tell you that the OED does run adequately well under Virtual PC on Tiger

happy days

Peter
 
We really need to know how fast your Mac is!

Virtual PC is unusable on my iMac G4 800 MHz. It's usable but not snappy on my DP 1.8 G5.

Doug
 
Hmmm. I have read so many conflicting reports of Virtual PC's performance. I can only say I have a 1 Ghz imac with just 512 of RAM, running Windows 2000 with RAM set to 192 and for my tiny humble little purposes (I like a little windows word processor called Yeahwrite, and a script writing program called Sophocles, but mostly I just wanted to access my Oxford English Dictionary cd -- for those who don't know, in hard back the dictionary is a 22 volume set or somesuch, a historical dictionary of virtually every English word ever, something different from your usual computer dictionary, even the very nice one included in Tiger) -- Anyway, I digress -- for my humble purposes Virtual PC 6.1 runs okay -- about 8 to 10 seconds to launch a saved desktop session (about three or four minutes for a cold boot, but I try always to save the session). For me, Windows 2000 runs about like it would on an old laptop with 192 megs of RAM, which is to say, slow but usable. I hope this helps.

Peter

ps -- I should add that I have read that Windows 2000 runs much better, which is to say snappier, under Virtual PC than does XP -- probably you already knew that . . .
 
Yeah. I use XP in VPC. That's all I have. I only play around with it for fun anyway. I turned off all the eye candy (ugly eye candy -- but don't get me started) and I allowed it 512 MB which is the max VPC 7 allows.

Doug
 
i have VPC6 running Win2000 and WinXP on my 1.25 Ghz Powerbook with 1 GB ram. it's pokey slow. however, i also have VPC 6 running Win98 on a 933 Mhz powermac g4 which is okay. VPC7 running WinXP on a 1.8 Ghz G5 iMac with 1 GB ram runs not bad. It's the best I've seen. I run UPS shipping software on that.

I figure out how to set up Remote Desktop with the PC, and it's happened to be much faster even. If you can spare a separate PC and can keep your software on another computer, Remote Desktop from Microsoft isn't bad. It's free too.
 
An update, in case anyone stumbles on this thread. The Oxford OED upgrade to 3.1 does not work under Virtual PC -- the disc validation required as part of the install process does not work, and according to the support folks at Oxford (who responded quickly & in depth I should say) there is no known work around to get the program to install -- the validation process works at a fairly low level with the CD Rom device, apparently (I have just slipped out of my depth there!) and will not work under Virtual PC on the Mac --

cheers

Peter
 
pdwalpole said:
the validation process works at a fairly low level with the CD Rom device, apparently (I have just slipped out of my depth there!) and will not work under Virtual PC on the Mac --
Click to expand...
That is a very good reason for the validation not working on Virtual PC. Windows itself is much more liberal in allowing software to directly access the hardware than Unix/OSX is or ever will be. This is one reason Windows is less stable than Unix and/or OS X. Quite simply OS X will not permit any application direct access to the hardware unless it goes through a kernel extension under the control of OS X. This is also the reason some OS 9 applications will not run in the classic mode.
 
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