virtual pc on mac book

Y

yvonnefinley

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Hello, I just bought a mac book, and I would like to run virtual pc on it. [I bought virtual pc a couple of years ago and it worked fine on my I book G4] I now have great trubles getting it on the new mac. What can I do? I already installed parallels desktop 4 on it [ it was a free trial]

Thanks Yvonne
 
Virtual PC is not the right solution: it emulate an Intel CPU on a Gx CPU. A new MacBook has an Intel CPU, so that your software will use a second abstraction layer to emulate the Gx CPU on the Intel CPU. Not very efficient.

Go for Parallels or for Fusion (VMWare) for an efficient integration of Windows on your Mac. Or run BootCamp (free).
 
There is one more option, Sun VirtualBox.. and CrossOver if you prefer.

So you can pick any

- Boot Camp. Included with Mac OS X 10.5 (on intel Macs) - free, but you can use either Mac OS X or Windows at any time, not both
- VMware Fusion. $ 79, can use an existing Boot Camp partition. If you use any other VMware Product (including but not limited to ACE, Workstation, VirtualCenter, ESX, Lab Manager, View Manager, VDM ...) the VMware vm format is cross compatible. You can also try for 30 days before buying http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion
- Parallels. Priced like its competitor (above), and was the coolest Mac OS X virtualization product before Fusion came out. But comparing these two will create fuss so give it a try yourself (again 30 days trial) to see which one you like more http://www.parallels.com/ also can use an existing Boot Camp partition
- VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads free, but can't do anything 64-bit etc etc (which is still a limitation of also Parallels if they didn't update their code with last release?)
- Crossover for Mac http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ $ 39 and the main difference is that you would be running basically individual applications, not virtuallizing the whole OS
 
To add, CrossOver Mac would basically supply an open source implementation of the Windows APIs that would allow you to run Windows applications without actually running the Windows OS, which means that there's no virtualization (not emulation, thanks Gia ;)) of Windows involved as they other solutions mentioned would do.
 
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My experience:

I used Parallels during 2-3 weeks, but it was not perfectly stable. I must say is was Parallels 1 and now they sell Parallels 4

I tried Fusion and I bought it. It is perfectly fine.

I tried Crossover months ago and it was unable to run most apps.

And for gaming or more agressive stuff, I use BootCamp. (Start by installing BootCamp, install Fusion later so that you can use the same partition... of course you'll need a full version of XP too).
 
Parallels 4 is actually miles ahead of competition right now. Perfectly 64bit, can use all 8 cores on a Mac Pro, faster than VMware etc. There were some problems with the first builds of Parallels 4, but those have been sorted out by now.
 
I didn't see this mentioned yet, but VirtualPC is not compatible with Intel-based Macintosh computers (which is what you have now -- a MacBook with an Intel Processor) and that's why you can't use it with your new MacBook. Your iBook G4 had a PowerPC processor which is what is required to use VirtualPC.

I have used all three of Parallels, Fusion and VirtualBox, and feel that each have their strong points:

1) Parallels -- fast!
2) VMWare Fusion -- able to use more than one core of a processor, now moot with Parallels 4
3) VirtualBox -- FREE!
 
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