Product Reviews

Despite the proliferation of Mac applications, especially in the design and publishing worlds, there are still at least 10 times as many applications out there for Windows. If you or your business have to run one of these, you have two choices: Buy PCs to do it, or keep your Macs and use one of the applications that allows you to run Windows on a Mac.

All the packages for running Windows work by having a core that emulates an entire Intel-based PC in software, andthen running the standard version of an operating system like Windows on top of that. Connectix's Virtual PC series of products has gained a reputation as being marginally faster than its closest rival, SoftWindows, and the product now comes in a package with Windows 2000, the most recently released of the Windows family.

Deciding whether to use Windows 2000 or Windows 98 isn't as simple a choice as you'd expect. Despite the naming conventions, Windows 2000 isn't a direct successor to Windows 98, and isn't a replacement. Instead, it's effectively a new version of Windows NT, the desktop and server operating system that will, one day, become the only version of Windows.

Windows 2000 itself looks remarkably like Windows 98, and yet the core of it is completely different. The OS is built on a foundation that, like Apple's forthcoming Mac OS X, is a true multitasking environment created for reliability. Certainly, in use, Windows 2000 is much more reliable than either Mac OS 9 or Windows 98. Crashes in one application rarely mean that the whole system falls over, and crashed applications can usually be restarted without any problem.

The

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first thing to note about Virtual PC 3.0 with Windows 2000 is that it's much more demanding on your resources than its predecessor. Whereas the Windows 98 version will happily run on a Mac with 80Mb of RAM, Windows 2000 needs 128Mb to really be effective, although you can squeeze the whole application on to a Mac with a total of 128Mb in a pinch. Forget about using virtual memory either, unless you want to see your Mac's performance plummet dramatically. Windows 2000 also needs a fast processor - at least a 300MHz G3 or G4. The ideal system to run it on would be a Power Mac G4 with at least 256Mb of RAM, so this product certainly isn't for the poor of pocket.

Even with a 400MHz Power Mac G4 and plenty of RAM, the performance of Windows 2000 on Virtual PC isn't great. It's noticeably slower than Windows 98, even using applications that don't demand enormous amounts of power.

But, the miracle is that Windows 2000 does work. It's a complete emulation of aPC running the most complex operating system ever built, and it ran every single application we threw at it, even those which would normally only be used on servers.

However, there are a couple of things to consider about this product. The first is why anyone would want to run Windows 2000, rather than Windows 98 - at least for the moment. At present, there are very few applications that the average desktop user would want to run that work only on Windows 2000, rather than Windows 98. And, as we've seen, Windows 98 already delivers greater performance with fewer resources under Virtual PC.

Then there is the price. For less than £1000, you just buy a PC that will be fast enough to run Windows 2000 better than the fastest Mac around. And if you're using an emulation product for more than a few minutes a day, buying a PC will save you time - and money - in the long run.

It has to be said that seeing Windows 2000 running under emulation on a completely different processor, in a window on your Mac, is really something to behold. The only question you may want to ask yourself now is whether you want to run it at all. If you do, and you have to do it on a Mac, then Virtual PC is the solution. It isn't fast, but it works.