Useful for lots of things...
Written: Oct 06 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great software that does it's job well
Cons: Can be slow on older machines
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| gerstein's Full Review: Connectix Virtual PC |
I'm normally very pro-mac, so I guess I'm pretty happy that the first company to emulate a PC in a Mac, and do it very well, was Connectix. They've got some other software packages that were very good (RAMDoubler, SpeedDoubler, CopyDoubler) and the QuickCam's were pretty cool - so what's not to like, right?
Well, I thought I'd never need Virtual PC, but I finally broke down and bought a copy when version 2 came out. It's pretty fast, and everything I've used has always pretty much worked. There were some problems with some games, but they were only recently, on my new laptop, and I have better games for my Mac, so I didn't care.
The software is pretty robust, and one of the best things about it is that if you keep a backup copy of your drive image, you can easily recover from a crash in the PC side of things - just replace the copy that's broken! Granted, this could take up a lot of drive space, but it makes it VERY easy to experiment with things in the PC side and not have to spend 8 hours rebuilding everything.
With version 3, things are faster and Connectix has built in support of just about everything USB. I plugged the office's USB CDRW drive into my computer while Virtual PC was running, and Windows started trying to auto-install the drivers! I didn't need that functionality, but it amazed me that it happened, and so quickly!
I'm able to use a variety of Microsoft and other Windows products with Virtual PC, and they all work flawlessly (or at least as well as they do on a PC ;). We have some of MS's development tools at work (Visual InterDev, Source Safe, etc) and they all work very well - if I choose full-screen mode, some of the programmers forget that I have a Mac!
Another useful feature is the full-screen mode. My company had to demo our product for a trade show, but wanted to do it on an iMac. I loaded Virtual PC onto it, one of the IS folks configured it, I made sure no-one could get out of Virtual PC, and we shipped it off. The sales people at the show didn't have any problems with the machine working (Windows is another story ;) and it made a great impression on our clients and potential clients - a win win situation!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
gerstein
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Member: Adam Gerstein
Location: Milford, CT
Reviews written: 110
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
Father of 4. Computer geek. Opinionated. What more can I say?
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