Is Virtual PC 7 really THIS slow???
 

I have been using RealPC in Classic mode to run Win98 so that I could use the one PC application I need that is not available natively on the Mac. With performance tweaking, it has been bearable, but one of the downsides is that once a single user starts up Classic, no other accounts on the computer can use Classic apps. It just so happens that other's in my family need to use this same PC application. I could closed Classic when not in use, but that's not always an option.

So I splurged and bought Virtual PC 7 with XP Home Edition. I had read reviews that it was slow, but I figured, "It can't be slower than Win98 emulated in the Classic environment." Wow, was I wrong. I can deal with the lengthy installation time (hey, it only happens once, right?), but it takes forever to boot to the XP desktop! I literally go watch TV and check back every commercial break to see if I have a Start menu. Then I click on Start and go watch TV again. It actually locks up the computer until it has responded to my mouse clicks. I cannot command-tab to another application, move the mouse or type on the keyboard until it's done. I can't even bring up the Force Quit dialog to stop the stupid thing until it's ready to let me.

I would imagine Win98 in VP7 would perform quicker??? Unfortunately, I do not have a bootable instal disk for Win98, so I can just create a blank virtual machine and load it. I've tried to create MS-DOS disk images to load with Win98 recovery files in RealPC (as well as downloadable EXE for making boot disks), but Win98 will only write those files the floppy drive. RealPC only maps the floppy drive to a Mac's physical floppy drive- and guess what- I don't have a physical floppy drive on my iMac!

Unless someone here has some suggestions, I'll be posting a link for a brand new VP7 XP Home Edition NIB on eBay to try and cut my losses!

I don't have personal experience with Virtual PC 7, but there have been several recent threads about it on these forums.
A few points:
1) The Classic environment is not an emulator - hence it runs Virtual PC at the same speed as OS 9 - i.e. slightly faster than in OS X, even in the most recent versions of VPC.

2) Windows XP is much slower than Windows 98 on anything less than the most recent hardware.

3) VPC is RAM hungry. You need to give it as much RAM as possible. Thus you certainly should not be running anything else that uses much RAM - e.g. the Classic environment. And I think you can forget about having multiple users simultaneously running VPC unless you have a few GB of RAM.

How much memory does your machine have? How much have you allocated to Win XP?

Have you tried disabling all the extra services and UI "pretty" crap that loads automatically? You can find tutorials on how to do this with a google search, or just pick up the software from litepc.com which lets you do it easily in a click interface.

Why do you "boot" the VPC so often? Just leave Windows running and close the window, essentially hibernating Windows. Then when you start it, un-sleeping it just takes a few seconds and leaves you where you left off.

Thanks, Hayne.

When I mentioned emulation, I was referring to Win98 running in an emulated PC by RealPC. I'm not running VP7 in Classic since that's what I'm trying to get away from- I want an OSX PC emulator.

I installed and tested VP7 with no other users logged on and only the Finder running (other than non-GUI apps). I have it set to use the max RAM its preferences will allow (512MB out of 1GB installed). It is still unbearably slow and utterly useless.

I think you are right about the multiple users. Even if I managed to load Win98 instead of XP, I suspect the performance improvement, if any, will not be dramatic enough to make VP7 usable on my computer.

Speaking of which, I realize I should have given my specs for reference:

• iMac flat panel
• 800mhz G4
• 60 gig drive (about 25-30 gig available)
• 1GB RAM

It certainly meets the minimum requirements on the box (700mhz G3, G4, G5; 128MB RAM). I'm thinking if they can say that this could be used in any capacity on a G3 700mhz, 128MB computer, it should be much more acceptable on my machine than it appears to be.

Any thoughts on how to get Win98 loaded into VP7 without a bootable install disk? I do have the installation files- just not on a bootable CD.

Carlos, I would love to turn off the GUI candy, but it would take hours to do so, and probably wouldn't have a significant enough impact on performance to make it usable. I am not kidding when I say that clicking a menu item or right-clicking an icon takes several minutes to respond, and until it does respond I cannot do anything else on the computer. I would hibernate XP when not in use to avoid the boot time, but that still wouldn't address its overall slowness to use.

Why would it take hours to right-click and choose Performance for the display options?

I can tell you one thing about VPC, it runs noticeably faster if you shut down every other app you're running. On my 1GB PowerBook G4, it's tolerable. It does not take forever to boot. Menus come up rather quickly, considering. But if I have other apps running, VPC slows down to the point I want to throw a brick through the screen.

Also, small apps run fine, and big apps run disproportionately slower. That is to say, a major app might not run 2x slower than a minor app, but 20x slower, in my experience.

Windows 2000 Pro is the way to go with Virtual PC 7.

First off, when I look at the requirements (e.g. on Amazon), I see that it says 512 MB RAM for the XP Home version.
But you need to learn to take those minimum requirements with many more grains of salt! The performance you report is indeed way out of whack with what I would expect, but I think a machine with the minimal requirements would likely be very slow. I.e. it would not really be usable except by very patient users running minimal apps.

I agree! I have a fairly old G4, and W2K pro runs pretty good in VPC 7. Right clicking does not take minutes for the menu to pop down! It's almost instantaneous.

Also as far as booting into the Windows desktop... don't shut down the PC, just use the save state setting... it comes up real quick.

I agree with Win2k. However, the delay you describe doesn't seem normal. It's been a while since I ran WinXP in VPC, but it was nowhere near that bad (G4 1.5, 256MB allocated to VPC). On a 1GHz system I can run Win2k rather comfortably.

Actually, if you have a license for Windows98 and you don't intend on running it under RealPC any more, why not install Windows98 under VPC7? It'll run about 18 times faster than XP.

If you have a license for Windows XP, you automatically have a license to run any previous OS in its place. This applies to all MS software; you can always downgrade a license.

I'd happy offer to send a copy of Windows 2000, but I don't know if the admins here would consider that too close to piracy. If an admin approves, I make the offer.

For the record, NT4 blazes in VPC. It's faster than 98/98SE or anything later. Your performance seems very abnormal though, even for XP.

I can't stress how nice NT4 runs in VPC. It can still run most modern apps, and most importantly, you can install IE 6 to test web sites you design. On an 800mhz G4 it feels almost native.

CAl: You can make any kind of trade/deal/offer/sale off the forums through private messaging, e-mail or AIM without having to go through admins.

AHunter3, thanks. I guess I'm not expressing myself clearly enough here- I am asking for help getting Win98 installed on VPC7. As I understand it, I have two options because my Win98 install software is not on a bootable disk:

1. Make an MS-DOS bootable disk so I can boot a blank VPC7 machine. After reading my original post, How can I do this option?
2. Boot my XP VPC7 machine to an MS-DOS prompt so I can install from my existing Win98 disk. Knowing full well this will take a long time due to XP's snail pace, How can I do this option?

I appreciate all the help and attention, but I do not intend to drop one more penny on this endeavor. I've spent nearly $200 on a pretty plastic box, I'm not going to spend even shipping charges on a 'free' older Window$ version.[U]

Not negotiated using our board, please. I don't think that 'automatic downgrade' of the license by Microsoft is as automatic as it used to be. I don't want to see us held liable if it's not.



I'd start by doing a Google search for "boot disk."

Thanks, Craig. I did that before starting this post (mentioned in passing in the third paragraph). All I ever found were EXE files that were hardcoded to write to the floppy drive. RealPC only maps the A: drive to a physical floppy, which my iMac does not have.

However, I tried Google again with a different search ("what files are needed for a dos boot disk?") and found this: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000432.htm

I'll give it a try and report back.

You can go to the Boot Disk Project page and download a ZIPed image of the DOS 7 Boot disk (Needed for Win 98/98se). This file can be selected as a floppy in VPC and will allow installing from the CD. Understand though that VPC7 was not written to run Win 98 optimally. It will seem very slow. VPC7 works best with Win 2000 or XP.

Ditto that. Even the Server version of NT with every protocol (including Services for Macintosh) under the sun turned on, it's nimble and responsive.

a) What you want is a bootable MS-DOS floppy disk image. Easy to make if you've got a Mac newer than an original SE but older than an iMac, and can boot to MacOS 9 (or 8 or 7). Insert bootable MSDOS diskette and drag onto Disk Copy. I am so equipped and could post such an .img file if it were legal to do so... is a bootable MSDOS diskette intrinsically equipped with the ability to format a hard disk as FAT32 and make it (the HD) bootable?

b) One does not "boot an XP VPC7 with a bootable MS-DOS floppy disk". If you're booting from the MS-DOS diskette, it's no longer an XP VPC7 machine, it's an MS-DOS VPC7 machine, and far from running at a snail's pace it should boot almost instantaneously. (AFAIK, modern PC hardware will still boot from positively-ancient versions of MS-DOS, yes?).

c) When you reboot from the hard disk, you'll still be in MS-DOS. Is your Windows98 on a huge stack of installation floppies, or on a CDROM? If it's on a CDROM, you'll need to have handy the MSDOS drivers for your CDROM, or are they built into DOS? I vaguely recall using the CDROM drive under DOS in SoftPC and typing "use cd" or adding "use cd" to autoexec.bat, don't remember for sure if I had to install drivers for it first or not. If you're going to need to install the drivers, you can drag them onto a mounted Finder copy of your MSDOS-bootable disk (erase contents, copy driver instally s/w to diskimage, unmount). In fact, you're going to get a lot of mileage from that diskimage, duplicating it and reusing it.

d) e.g., Installing Windows98 doesn't necessarily give you drivers for your video card. I don't know what VPC7 uses, but older VPC "thinks" it has a Sonnet Trio. If VPC7 uses a more modern (emulated) video card, W98 may not have had the drivers for it, just as Windows for Workgroups 3.11 did not have the Sonnet Trio drivers, and I had to download them and install them to get more than 640 x 480 x 8. (And the bloody ethernet card and TCP stacks, don't get me started). With W98 I guess your most likely need for drivers aside from vid card would be sound card.

Hope this helps.

I have a bootable disk image that came with VPC 3. It works just fine in VPC 7 for installing older versions of Windows. If you send me a private message with your email I will gladly send you the disk image.

Thanks, Las Vegas- I'll give this a try this evening.
Thanks, again, AHunter3- my Win98 install is on a CD, but I've made a disk image of it for convenience and (hopefully) quicker loading. I can map a drive in VPC7 to that disk image, theoretically bypassing the potential hangup with a CDROM driver. If I get far enough, we'll see if there's an issure with the video.

As for my second option, I know you can boot a PC running Win98 to a DOS prompt. I am asking how to do the same with XP. If I can get my existing XP VPC7 machine to boot to a DOS prompt (i.e. not a DOS boot disk), I should be able to map my install image to drive D: and begin the Win98 install.

Win98Se on VPC 7.
 

Well, speaking from current experience....

I posted a similar question some time ago and was advised to use 98. I dug out my old copy of that and installed it and it absolutely flies! I would rate it as faster than when it was originally on a PC all those years ago.

Mind you, I did give it the 512Mb of RAM etc. Works very well indeed.

Just my 6d. worth.
Gavin
Bangkok

I don't think Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP can "boot to a DOS prompt" the way Windows98 and Windows95 can. The latter beasties are based on a DOS kernel (in fact some have viewed them as huge complicated DOS applications rather than operating systems in their own right); the other three are based on the NT kernel and do not "have DOS running underneath" although they can emulate DOS (the command prompt).

You should have a blank empty hard disk volume to install Windows98 onto. If you do, you should boot from MSDOS, install the drivers to see the CDROM if necessary (and if it would be necessary on a hardware PC, it will be similarly necessary to access the VPC "virtual CDROM drive" that lets you use CD diskimages), and then run the installer app that's on the CD from the DOS prompt and install to the empty hard disk.

Leave XP out of this, it only complicates matters :)

Loading Win98SE right now
 

Finally , I am loading Windows 98 SE in VPC7 as I type. I appreciate everyone's help. I tried some of the boot disk images mention by Las_Vegas and others, but I just couldn't get VPC7 to recognize them.

So, armed with some knowledge and files from http://www.computerhope.com, I used my XP VPC7 machine to create a floppy image loaded with MS-DOS files. It took almost an hour start to finish and required some CDROM driver files and configuration, but I managed to use the floppy image to boot a "blank" machine and access my Win98SE install disk.

I then created a full-fledged 98 boot disk floppy image during installation, so I now have that and my custom made one.

If anyone is interested in the details, I would be glad to post them here.

Oh, "Getting ready to run Windows for the first time."- gotta go.

I was just reading the begining of this thread and I think your biggest problem is that you don't have enough RAM. You've got multiple accounts open with who knows how many processes in each, Classic open, and Virtual PC running in half of your RAM. Check your pages in/out. I'll bet they increase rapidly.

You could try rebooting, logging in only one user and running only VPC. If it's noticeably faster, it's got to be lack of RAM.

The slowness of XP I explained about was with no other user accounts logged in, no other GUI apps running but the Finder, and Classic was not running. I had done a hard reboot at more than one point because of the apparent lock up of VPC7. I have 1GB of RAM and a full 512MB allocated to VPC7, which doesn't appear to let me give it more RAM than that.

Regardless, the one PC app I need to use I have to use in conjunction with text software (TextEdit at a minimum, AppleWorks or similar preferred). Otherwise, I am defeating the purpose of even running Windows.

Win98 loaded, but I need to do it again
 

Well, I finished loading Win98 and it seemed to comparable in speed to Win98 in RealPC under Classic. I was hoping for an improvement there, but all I will seem to be getting is avoiding the startup time and overhead of Classic. Oh, well, I can live with that.

I shutdown and rebooted a couple of times to measure time and responsiveness (yes, I plan to save the session and avoid the bootup time).

But, when I attempted to load additional VPC features (print to Macs printer, share folders, etc.), the wizard stated that printer sharing was only available with Win2000 and up. It gave me the option to continue on with the other additions. I did so, since I don't need to print from Win98- just cut and paste. The wizard said I needed to reboot Win98 to take affect. Now it hangs at the startup screen.

I did an F8 at startup to get to safeboot options and can manage to get back to the desktop, a regular boot always hangs. I in the mahcine preferences, sharing and other additional features are all still unavailable. Eventhough it said just the printer, I suspect that none of the additions are available for Win98 (can someone confirm?), and that installing them is causing the hang.

I'll do a new, clean install and leave it at that.

There is an interesting technical post at MacInTouch (Dec 9 Jeff Bagby post) about how you can make Virtual PC faster by allocating LESS memory to it.

I haven't read that, but yes, VPC should not be allocated extra memory that it doesn't need. More specifically, try to keep it under or at 256MB, due to memory addressing/paging schemes used in Windows (which is after all just an 8-bit OS at its very heart, thus there are some kludges to be able to count higher than 256).

A "Yes it really is that @#$% slow" rant
 

I didn't read the thread, but to answer the title question, "Yes, in my experience it really is that slow." How do I define "that slow"? Well, it was slow enough to hog my whole system (while Windows did God only knows what, it was just sitting at the blissful desktop) so much that clicks in anything took literally (I'm not kidding at all here) several minutes to register. iTunes didn't have enough resources to play music without pausing for a minute or two between 10 second chunks of sound. It hogged my system so much that iTunes didn't have enough resources to write out the changes it made to the library before the operation timed out and hence corrupted my iTunes Music Library. (Thanks to MS I now don't feel safe unless I do backups of my cherished Music Library every other day. Thanks to cron I don't worry.) Thanks MS and everybody who won't program native Mac software, namely Magellan and Garmin in my case. I bought a cheap Dell and use it with MS RDC rather than run VPC on my Powerbook.

For the record I have an original 867mhz 12" Powerbook with 640mb ram, and I was running XP Pro SP2. I tried 2k and 98 with not so much disaster, but not much more luck either. I really think a cheap Windows PC is the way to go if at all possible, and I obviously I don't recommend that anybody use this, regardless of how much success people have had. Anything that crashes my computer goes out the window... no pun intended.

Rant aside, most people don't have this problem, and there are many successful users of VPC. Sounds like you allocated way too much memory to the VPC, or ran far too many apps for the existing OS X memory allocation.

Too many apps?
 

I didn't even have time to load apps, and I could barely get it to install the VPC extras and the XP updates. I was only running iTunes, Adium, Safari and Mail outside of VPC. I assigned 256mb of RAM to XP, which we all know is a sensible amount. I don't know what exactly the problem was, but I do know something went wrong. It would boot into XP and instantly start hogging my CPU. 98 worked much better, though, and I suppose I wouldn't advise anybody not to run 98, but the apps I wanted to run didn't work within VPC in 98 even though they did on a real Win98 system. Using VPC was an incredibly frustrating experience and a great refresher as to why I bought a Mac in the first place.

I read the info about RAM allocation and I say "Hmm". Cue up VPC and select the W2K virtual machine. Watch and wait while it launches with all the responsiveness and smoothness of the Queen Mary II pulling out into a hurricane. Wait until it finishes counting its fingers and toes and try opening some windows and launching an app or two.

Compared to this, running MacOS 7.5.5 in a Basilisk II window within Windows NT in Virtual PC is downright snappy.

If it's any faster upon being cut back to 256 total allocated RAM, it isn't isn't faster in an obvious way.

Were you trying to run programs that required DirectX? MS has yet to get VPC to work with DirectX. My guess at the CPU hogging after XP "booted" is that XP is not done booting when you see the desktop... it's only about 75-80% done. At any rate, I'm sorry to hear that VPC didn't work out for you, but it sounds like you've taken care of that by getting a cheap PC.

As CAlvarez can attest, I'm no fan of Windoze. My main reason for disliking VPC is that it creates a window on my Mac that acts just like a #$!@*%^ PC!

That said, I think you've got to understand that an 867Mhz G4 with only 640MB of RAM is a little underpowered to try to emulate another processor running another operating system. I use VPC (only because I must) on a Dual 2 Ghz G5 with 1 Gig of RAM. I give VPC 352MB of RAM.

That seems to be fine, as it runs about as fast as the laptop I won (wouldn't buy one!) last fall. but I only run one app on VPC and I treat it the way I would a real PC. I got it working, so I make no changes! None. I don't use it for email or browsing the web, because that would be fool hardy. Remember that VPC is just as vulnerable to viruses and spyware as any PC.

It boils down to this, if you want VPC to run well, you need a fast Mac with plenty of RAM, you need to keep both optimized, and you need to properly configure the PC. Once you've done that, don't let anything alter the PC configuration. It's a good idea to make a backup of the working PC drive for when something does get changed.

Another good trick for stability is to configure the VPC to not save any drive image changes at all. Every time you start VPC, you get your fresh, original drive image. Of course, you would want to store any data files on a shared folder, not within the VPC image, since they would not be saved.

Ok, here's the dealio - this info is taken from just about everywhere, from the blog of one of the guys who heads up the VPC project to who knows where - but it's all turned out to be reliable info for me:

1) VPC is tweaked to run the "NT" style OS's - I've installed everything EXCEPT NT4 - and my breakdown was that 2000 was slower than 98, which was slower (after tweaking, as decribed in the hint that was posted the other day) than XP.

2) If you allocate more than the recommended amount of memory (256 for XP) to VPC, you slow everything down - again, cuz it's tweaked to work in 256. If you give it more, it gets confused cuz it's crappy software made by the people who make the crappiest software in the world.

And you can pretty much bet, now that Connectix is out of the picture, that VPC is pretty much dead in the water - as Microsoft relies on other companies to innovate, then copies them. They're not capable of innovation. And given they have no competition in this area, at all - well...

Which is a long way of basically saying : Why in the heck did we not see DRAMATIC speed improvements after Microsoft took the project over from Connectix? Given they have access to TONS of information that Connectix didn't, how is it possible that they're completely incapable of enhancing the software?

So anyway - yes, it seems idiotic - but it is idiotic, so deal with it: Do NOT give the silly software more memory, do NOT attempt to install an ancient Windoze OS thinking it'll give you noticeable speed improvements, and do NOT use the stupid software at all if you can find a 286 lying around in a garbage dump.

My experience with VPC sucked almost 3 days out of my life - 3 days I'll never get back. But hey, at least I don't have to work on Windows for a living.

So if you wanna install Windows 98 and give it more memory and waste your life - have at it. But I'm here to tell ya - it's a COMPLETE waste of your time. But hey - live and learn.

Windows 2000 is an NT based OS, NT 5.0 to be specific, just as XP is NT 5.1.

VPC 7 was pretty much a complete overhaul of the product required to support the G5; it shouldn't be too surprising that it has issues. That's what happens with all software (e.g., Pages).

There are alternatives available now people might want to investigate.

My only contribution to this thread is this:

- ive never seen VP7 (ie the MS version)
- I ran win98 on VP6 (the last connectix one, which is the only other one which runs on OSX)
My win98 VP6 was fine for working with on my G4 800MHz desktop, the mac had 512MB ram and the virtual machine was given either 128 or 256 (i cant remember which). Ive no idea why there are people posting 'delays of minutes' after clicking on menus etc. I used to get a delay of a fraction of a second between menu click and seeing the response - hardly native speed, but useable.

My suggestions are as follows:
- maybe VP6 is 'better' than VP7 (maybe it would run 98 better than VP7)
- there could be something screwy with your VP6 setup or your drive image (?)
- could your virtual machines have viruses?? that would surely cripple it...
- XP Pro runs really well on a celeron 400MHz PC with about 200MB ram, so shoulld run on most modern (ie better than 1GHz) G4 machines.
- i wouldnt run iTunes at the same time, as it is continually doing stuff - just do without it while you are actively using the virtual machine

Also, there was a recent posting at the main hints site in using the RDC ability of XP Pro to access a virtual machine (alegedly gives faster performance than the VPC graphical output). Here is the link:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50128001523612
- interestingly, the poster of the hint claims that XP runs FASTER than win98 on his VPC setup. I would believe this, as XP certainly seems to run at least as fast as 98 on a native PC as long as there is plenty of RAM (ie 200MB or over).

BUT, the way I do it is as follows:
- old celeron 400MHz PC with 224MB RAM
- install XP Pro SP2
- plug into my home ethernet network and get it set up (Firefox, decent firewall, antivirus etc)
- remove the mouse and the monitor and hide it behind a sofa

Then, when i need (rarely) to run a windoze-only application, i just reach behind the sofa, hit the power button and wait 5 mins to let it boot to the login screen (it seems to take it a while before it responds to RDC connections). I use it through the network using the MS remote desktop program (OSX native app) and it runs really well. Even over 802.11b wifi...

decidely more than 2 cents worth, but hope it helps!

I had this problem when I converted a VPC 6/Win98SE disk image for VPC 7 use. What I ended up doing was installing all the patches offered to me for Win98SE via Internet Explorer. Didn't matter if it didn't seem topical -- I just installed it, thinking that whatever was causing the hang might get overwritten.

Seemed to work.

And for FWIW, 98 does not seem "18x" than XP for my set up. Some things, like printing over a network, or any I/O tasks for that matter, are quite a bit slower (on my Dual 2.5).

Regarding the original post. How long does it take to get from zero to usable desktop on your machine? By that I mean not from a saved state, but from a competely shut down Windows. I just timed my PowerBook G4 1.25GHz 1GB RAM running 10.3.7 and Virtual PC 6 with Windows XP Pro and Service Pack 2, and it was just under two minutes from Windows start to when the taskbar icons are all present, the hourglass is gone, and the Start menu responds. All menus are very responsive.