Product Reviews

When Mac OS X was first released, Virtual PC users were disappointed to find that this enormously useful PC emulation program was incompatible with the new operating system. Needless to say, OS X compatibility was top of most people's request list of new features for this latest upgrade. Connectix hasn't disappointed us, as Virtual PC 5.0 is a splendid example of how to produce an OS X upgrade.

Virtual PC is now fully Carbonized, which means that it runs under both OS X and Mac OS 9. The program's interface automatically adapts so its menus, windows and dialog boxes conform to the style of the operating system you're using. And most of the new features are available in both operating systems, with the exception of two, that are only available in OS X.

We encountered one minor hitch when installing the program. If you want to use Virtual PC 5.0 with both OS 9 and OS X you are advised to install it from within OS X. When you do this the installer automatically creates a hard disk file that acts as the virtual hard disk for your virtual PC. However, if you then switch back to OS 9, the program can no longer remember the location of this hard disk file, preventing it from running properly.

The manual mentions this, but the solution it gives didn't work during our tests. This meant we had to hunt around for the hard disk file, which turned out to be buried in the Documents folder within the Home folder within the Users folder on the OS X partition. This conforms with the way OS X organises files, but it still slowed us down until we found the file and then used the Hard Disk dialog box to select it in OS 9 again.

Once that was done, Virtual PC worked without a hitch. The program currently ships with Windows 98 preinstalled, but there will be other versions of Windows available soon.

The first new feature you'll notice is that the icons in the Status bar that runs along the bottom of the screen now provide access to various settings dialog boxes, rather than just providing a status display. This makes it easier to modify settings for such options as networking, USB peripherals and shared folders.

There's

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a very clever new option for altering the Windows screen resolution. Click on the corner of the Virtual PC window and drag the window out, and Windows will automatically 'snap' up to the next screen resolution. So, if it's running in an 800 x 600 pixels window you can click on the corner of the window and instantly snap it up to 1024 x 768 pixels without using the Windows Display control panel to alter the resolution.

Even handier is the new 'undoable' hard disk feature. When you make any changes to your Windows setup, those changes aren't applied to the hard disk file. All changes are saved in a separate file - a kind of virtual hard disk. If anything goes wrong while you're working in Windows you can discard this file, leaving your normal hard disk file untouched. This will be really for developers or technical support staff who use Virtual PC to test pre-release software as they can check how the software works without worrying about messing up their Windows settings.

These features are available in both OS X and OS 9, but there are two additions that are only available in OS X. The first of these is support for multiprocessor systems. On a dual-processor Mac, Virtual PC uses one of the Mac's processors to run the emulated Pentium processor and then offloads the graphics work on to the second processor so that screen updates are handled by the second processor.

This sounds like good news, as you'd expect to get a real improvement boost from using a dual-processor Mac. But if you've got a single-processor Mac you'll find that Virtual PC runs slower under OS X than under OS 9, simply because OS X is a bigger, heavier beast than OS 9. So, on a 500MHz DP G4 system, we found that the extra processor merely brought Virtual PC back to the same performance level that you can with a single processor under OS 9. To be fair, this is mainly due to the demands of OS X and can't really be blamed on Connectix.

Virtual buddies

The other OS X-only feature is the ingenious Virtual Switch. Virtual PC 4.0 lets you create multiple virtual PC systems that could run alongside each other, as long as you had enough RAM to cope with all of them. Now, in OS X, you can network these virtual PCs together to create a virtual network inside your Mac. This will allow developers or IT staff to test network settings in a safe environment without mucking up their main network.

The sheer ingenuity involved in features such as this shows how much thought Connectix has put into this upgrade. It's disappointing to see that the performance takes a bit of a hit under OS X, but the new features in this upgrade more than compensate, making the program more efficient and easier to use than ever before.