Peter's Gekko

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Things you cannot do with (Virtual PC for) the Mac (?)

Mac users can be pretty religious about their OS. Which is nice but in the end you cannot do everything with a Mac. When you're a student and are dependent on the websites and slideshows your teachers have in store for you; you just need Powerpoint and IE on Windows. There is a way to get the best of both: Virtual PC for Mac. Which will give you a virtual PC running Windows in a window on the Mac. Recently I set up a such a creature and bumped into some issues. I'm not 100% sure about all of them, hence the (?). So feel free to chime in or light a match.

Exchanging virtual machines is (next to) impossible. A virtual PC created under Windows is one big file containing the complete machine. A virtual PC created on a Mac is a gigantic tree in which it is completely unclear what contains what. You can import a Windows created machine on a Mac; the other way round looks like an unsolvable puzzle. The Mac OS is nice because it hides all internals from the user but the disaster is that it still keeps everything hidden for the experienced user. You just get lost in files not being a file, resource forks, and differences between the display name and the name on disk. Yuck !
VirtPC for Mac cannot work with an NTFS virtual machine. When creating a new virtual PC VirtPC mac suggests a FAT or a FAT32 disk. When you create a virtual PC under Windows it's no problem to give it a NTFS disk. So far I found out that VirtPC for Mac totally crashed on every Windows created PC I gave it. I should try feeding it a FAT machine; but that's an experiment which does take some time. There is a known issue with the Mac OS X on external (USB) drives with NTFS; such disks are read-only.
Virtual PC for Mac will not run a Vista PC. Even before you run into the file system issue Virt PC trips over the Mac's bios and reports it not supporting ACPI. With new macs on Intel processors people are trying to boot Windows XP on a Mac. So far without success. It would have been hilarious to have Vista running on PowerPC hardware. Almost as hilarious as running Linux on an Xbox. Which is possible.

On the other hand, having seen Vista, who needs a Mac ?

<update>This post was based on version 7 of vpc. As far as I can see this is quite a different creature than version 6. On the outside one big vpc7 file, on the inseide no vhd's and the like ..</update>

Published Feb 14 2006, 05:59 AM by pvanooijen

Comments

Peter's Gekko said:

Perhaps somebody will recognize this posts subtitle as the title of Julien Ceyssial's blog. He used to...

# February 14, 2006 6:39 AM

David B. said:

New to your postings, thoughts and writing styles I still felt an urge to comment. Of course we all have our own likes and dislikes. I work on both Mac and PC. Mac at home and PC at work. In college I was on a mac for 5 years. The only time that I have ever felt the urge to run Virtual PC on my mac was to work with AutoCad. Other than that I had Powerpoint on my PC and Mac, IE on my PC and Mac. Excell On my PC and Mac. Almost all of my major programs were on both pc and mac. I have never had a problem accessing a website because I was on a mac, except of Microsoft's firm grip on every piece of content on Microsoft.com. Which didn't matter because even if you were on a PC you were limited to one program to do something on their site. Microsoft gives you no choices. And I like to have a choice.

As for GUI, having seen little of Vista, I would still have to say that the Mac GUI is stunning. Comparing the GUI of a pc and mac is like comparing a round shape to a square shape.

I say all this not for you to think, there goes those mac freaks again, (which seems to be the easy way to dismiss us) but to just share my thoughts with you. I learned on windows, fell in love with mac, and am forced to work on a pc.

# February 14, 2006 10:09 AM

Peter's Gekko said:

Perhaps somebody will recognize this posts subtitle as the title of Julien Ceyssial's blog. He used to...

# February 14, 2006 2:58 PM

John Rudy said:

I haven't played with the latest version of Virtual PC for Mac, but on V6 I had no problem shifting virtual hard drives from Mac to Windows (whatever the rev before 2004 was) and back again, nor did I have problems creating NTFS drives on Mac. (Which was critical for me; I was running Win2K3 Server and needed NTFS file security for some of my testing.)

That said, I haven't tried playing with the new revs for both platforms lately. Most of the time I've stuck to Windows on my company's Dell laptop on Mac OS my Powerbook and been a happy guy ...

(BTW, the trick for moving the files is to only move the VHD -- Virtual Hard Drive -- file. Rebuild the VPC file settings.)

# February 14, 2006 7:04 PM

pvanooijen said:

David, I did this setup for someone who'se only piece of hardware is an iBook and does not have the room/will to add a physical PC.
Comparing XP to MAc is no match, but Vista vs OSX is quite an interseting match.
YEs the MAc wasthe first to have it. I know.

John, looking for the vhd file on the mac revealed the maze of other stuff. No simplefile to be found. Which is my problem with the MAc, it looks so simple on the outside and is so weird on the inside. The NTFSproblem is still marked with a ?, having the time and the diskspaceon the mac I'll try to get an NTFS machine running on the MAc.

# February 15, 2006 5:43 AM

pvanooijen said:

ABout that IE thing, it's not just MS. As IE dominates the market a lot of people don't test their sites against anything else but IE. The details may be as small as a footnote. But when the fottnote contains your reading list, you're in trouble. It's not you need a PC for the site, you need IE, firefox on the PC has just the same problem.

# February 15, 2006 7:04 AM

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