What Virtual PC does is emulate PC hardware so that you can run Windows within the Mac OS.

I would not plan on having a great gaming experience within Virtual PC. I would expect gaming to be iffy at best under Virtual PC. What else besides games do you need Windows for?

Also note that Virtual PC is not compatible with the G5, so if you get a G5 you will not be able to run Virtual PC at all until Microsoft releases an updated version.

What I was trying to say was that you can play the games included standard with windows: solitaire, minesweeper, ... but not much more than that. Anything 3D will not work. Most games will simply not install (graphic card detection).

I don't want to generalize this too much, but emulated windows runs at about 3rd speed compared to a windows machine. VPC needs a lot of horsepower & RAM to run at a tolerable speed. It's mainly used for some office applications & double checking a website through IE for Win. You have to remember it loads OS X first, then Windows. The smaller the Windows footprint (98SE) the better it works. Without a fast Mac with lots of RAM it'll be slow like on a Pentium without much RAM.

VPC 4 with Win98 & 2k was doable on a G4 450Mhz Mac ... and supposedly v5 & v6 of VPC brought more speed (but then on the other hand you start dealing with 600MB windows 2000 & 1.5 GB windows XP), but I just reverted back to a spare PC.

I'd say save the money for VPC for something else. Keep that Pentium I or II (or?) around, clean it up software wise with a fresh install for when you need to run something on Windows. I know first hand what it is to switch and had the same thought on running VPC, installing some softwares in there I owned etc so I wouldn't have to buy those for Mac ... but I couldn't tolerate the lack of speed, so I keep that PC around for the 5% of things I need it for.

icerabbit

---

PM G5 DP 2.5 - G4 Cube - G3 iMac - iPod 4G & 5.5G

I would agree with these posts. I've used VPC from v2.0 thru v5, and it is a least effective way to run Windows programs, of the options listed. As fast as the VPC programming team streamlined and strengthened their software, Microsoft would add code to Windows software, and the end result was faster Macs didn't do any better with emulation.

I've also used SoftWindows (no longer around) and several of the old Mac Windows-PC-on-a-Card computers. The PCI cards were the fastest, but cost almost twice as much as a comperable second PC. Still not a good solution.

I play Star Wars: Rebellion, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and other relatively simple games from back in the day on my computer with VPC.

I don't think GTA 3 or Vice City would run well at all, because they need a decent video card. That is VPC's failing; it doesn't support a video card.

I mainly use VPC Win 2k with activesync 3.7, i occasionally use XP-Pro with 3.5 but XP is real slow in VPC. 2k has been the fastest so far, (i can even run Autocad 14 fairly well). These combos have worked with PPC 2002 and PPC 2003 without any problems.