[X4U] VPC and Win2K

[Zane H. Healy]

>On Apr 17, 2005, at 5:16 pm, Andy Hannen wrote:
>>
>>I've been running(?) VPC with WinXP on my G4 800MHz. It's intolerably slow.
>
>Have you tried tweaking the performance settings in XP? I think 
>you'll find them if you right-click My Computer & have a furtle. You 
>can remove the rounded-corners of Windows, drop-shadows, animations 
>&c. I wouldn't expect XP to be too snappy on a PIII 800, so I'm not 
>surprised it's slow on your  G3.

Right-Click on the desktop, and select "Properties".  Then click on 
the "Themes" tab on the "Display Properties" dialog box.  Select 
"Windows Classic" from the drop-down menu.

This will make XP look like Win2k, and significantly improve your 
performance.  However, the whole Pentium III 800Mhz comparison vs. G4 
800Mhz isn't fair.  The G4 is having to emulate the PC.  I'm running 
on a dual 2Ghz G5, and even on it WinXP seems to be significantly 
slower than on a dual Pentium II 400Mhz.

I've installed the following additional OS's under VPC 7.
AROS
BeOS
MS DOS 6.22 / Win 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 98SE

Of those the only ones that really perform well are AROS and 
MS-DOS/Win3.11.  The most frustrating thing is how bad the Disk I/O 
is.  The CD-ROM emulation is so slow that software written to use a 
1x CD-ROM can't even access the CD fast enough.  I was hoping to use 
VPC to run a few very old games (7+ years old) that I wanted to play. 
It won't work.

The other thing I was hoping to use it for is to run a few apps (one 
of which actually ran faster than its Mac counterpart). 
Unfortunately I found that when I did a lot of disk I/O under VPC, I 
ended up with a disk image that was so corrupt that it was 
inaccessible.  As a result there are only a couple minor programs 
that I can even use it for :^(

The end result is that for about the cost of a copy of VPC, you 
should be able to find a used system that will overall out-perform it 
(this assumes you can't find one for free).

		Zane


-- 
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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
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