Thinking of making the "switch" to a mac and osx, the mac mini cause of its price. Also to make things less painfull and since I still need many windows apps, I plan to tryout Virtual PC and load XP on it. Anyone have any experence on either of these ?
i think you should change your thread tittle, i didn't know what you where talking about. And i think paulo wanted one really bad, don't know if he got it though.
What do you wanna know? I have a little pre-XP Virtual PC experience, I'm sure that it's only gotten better all these years later.
Virtual PC would be very slow on a Mac mini. Maybe just slightly faster than on my iBook G4 due to the faster bus. Your old PC, unless it's from around 1997 or something, is several times faster. You need to have the memory allocation maxed out (512MB) to get anything approacing decent performance. This means you'll need 1GB in your mini (luckily DDR is dirt cheap right now). Once the program you're using in it loads, it's usually okay to use though (such as Visio, Access or Rational Rose which I've used in it). I wouldn't use more than a couple of things in it at a time. If the software you need to use that is Windows-based requires any sort of processing power, you've really should see if there's something Mac native, either a OS X version of it or a different program, that does the same thing. It's my personal opinion that having to rely on VPC for something you use very frequently and depend on, quite frankly sucks balls. On the positive side, the integration between Mac OS X and the virtual PC is pretty good; you can map your Mac's drive as a network drive in the PC OS, and there's a Dock-resident program you can use that'll map to the contents of your Windows Start menu and allow you to launch VPC along with the program in question if VPC is not already launched (otherwise it just launches the program). It shares network connections, printers, whatever. I believe you can also allow the PC exclusive use of certain hardware (software dongles or something like that). Bottom line is, if your existing PC and new Mac can coexist in your workflow, I would go that way if possible. If nothing else, using a Mac nearly exclusively for a while made it clear to me how and what I actually really do with a computer.
My husband has a mac mini the 1,4Ghz model with 512 megs of ram but virtual pc runs sooo slow. Your better off finding mac/open source alternatives for your windows software running at descent speeds then fiddling arround with virtual pc.
I just sold my Mac Mini 1.42GHz / 512mb DDR / Bluetooth / WiFi / iWork '05 to Paulo for his GF -_- I sort of regret it now as I'm back down to using a shitty 700mhz PC and I did get kind of attatched to the little fella, but for such a small package it does manage to kick arse somewhat, considering it's only got a 32mb GFX card it managed to run World of Warcraft in 1024x768 without any problems or the gfx looking shit!! I was tempted to buy Virtual PC but then I thought well If I want to run PC stuff I'll buy a fucking PC! The mac does have equivalents to many windows apps though and even M$ have ported a jazzier looking version of MSN without the ads and Office etc so really you can't lose out. What I would reccomend though which I didn't know about at 1st (because I got mine on day of UK launch) is to but the 1.2ghz model with 256mb DDR. The reason being both models use an identical processor, it's just that the cheaper model is underclocked - so all you have to do is move a resistor (literally) and blammo you saved some £££ and still got a 1.42ghz model. It's also possible now to buy a compatible 1gb stick of DDR about 1/2 the price apple charge for the 1GB stick, however it would require a bit more care to install it.
I should have known that you would eventually sell your mac mini legit (just like every other item you buy lol)
Dint bloody tell me that! i want my refund!!!! :smt043 Yeah its nice but i also got a 1gb shuffle in the package all for £400 shipped. Now i have a very very happy gf too!
went to the local Best Buy here, its 627.00 CAD. I can get the ram cheap so thats not a problem. Now thatI have seen it first hand....damn its small, and I want it more now. After so many years of using PC's and 5 years of selling/servicing them with the buisness, now that I closed the buisness I'm ready to learn something new and take a break from all that Micocrap...o and im a big linux fan and OSX is just that so its another atraction for me.
OS X ain't linux, it's just based on unix so is linux There is a bonafide Linux distro for Mac's though over @ http://www.yellowdoglinux.com It's Based on the Fedora Project's work but ported across for PowerPC use. I fancied giving yellowdog a whirl but never got round to buying Roxio Toast Titanium to burn the iso's
