PwrMac

In the Intel Mac age, Windows can run natively on Macs thanks to their Core Duo processors but unfortunately, PowerPC Macs don’t have this luxury. The only option for them was (and partially still is) to emulate a PC using Virtual PC 7. Although no longer sold, Virtual PC 7 took Intel machine code and translated into something that PowerPC registers could understand. The result was a program that allowed the installation on a “Virtual” PC on your computer. It was slow to say the least, but it wasn’t entirely unusable. It’s performance was acceptable for some applications, and was the only option to running Windows only software. The concept is outdated today due to the fact that Intel Macs can natively recognize Intel Code.

Virtual PC is slow. There is no debate. However it is reasonably responsive and it’s performance with non-resource heavy programs is more than acceptable.  In fact, Word 2007 running under emulation launches faster the Word 2008 does running natively:

Word 2008 takes 12.9 seconds to load under Leopard, where as Word 2007 only takes 9.6 seconds. This is kind of very sad. Think about it: Virtual PC 7 uses a portion of your Mac’s ram (which you can allocate, up to 512MB), and emulates a 550Mhz Pentium Pro processor.  I had to use Sandra Lite XI (a benchmark suite) to determine the processor type as it was never advertised and doesn’t show up under System Properties. By emulating a Pentium Pro, Virtual PC 7 lacks any type of single instruction multiple data or instruction set (which includes MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 etc). SIMD instruction sets accelerate any type of media and 3D instructions, and today’s OSes (and most programs) are optimized to take advantage of the added performance they provide (which may be one reason Virtual PC 7 has a hard time running resource heavy programs).  The Pentium Pro was in fact the last consumer Intel processor without a SIMD instruction set (Intel’s first SIMD instruction set was MMX, introduced with the Pentium MMX). 

In my opinion, this is one major factor that makes Virtual PC 7 so slow. The reason being is that according to Sandra Lite, the Integer and Floating point performance of the Pentium Pro in the PC environment is on par with 2Ghz+ processors. This is pretty impressive (but may also be dependent on the processor in your Mac):

Why Run Windows?

One of the main uses I have for Virtual PC 7 is Office 2007. Although I own Office 2008 for Mac, I find that while the compatibility between the Mac and PC Office documents is good, it’s far from perfect. Especially with PowerPoints. Being a full time college student I have use PowerPoint all the time, and with Virtual PC 7, I can fire up Windows XP and load the PowerPoint presentation. I can make changes to it as necessary so it displays properly on the PCs at school. Another reason for running Office 2007 is that some features are only available in the PC version of Office. Specifically, the ability to embed YouTube videos in PowerPoint Presentations. You simply can’t do this on a Mac, there is no option to.

There is also the occasion that I want to run a Windows only application. For instance, when Google Chrome came out in beta. Since there was no Mac version there was only one way I could try it out:

Virtual PC 7 & Leopard

So for some, like me, Windows under emulation is still a viable option to running Windows. However with Leopard and Vista there are some additional hurdles. Users of Virtual PC 7 were disappointed when they upgraded to Leopard: Leopard breaks Virtual PC 7’s ability to access a Mac’s DVD or CD drive. It turns out that there is a solution. 

Installing Apple’s Boot Camp Drivers (which are meant for Intel Mac’s running Windows) will regain the ability to use your optical drive. The Boot Camp drivers aren’t available for download off of Apple’s site and obtaining them can be a little hard. Thankfully user chrishelms at the InsanelyMac forums has been kind enough to find them and post them for download: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=71519 .

After you download the four pieces you’ll have to use a program like UnRarX to join them. Once you have the Drivers folder, drag it to the Windows desktop, open it up, and then open the Apple folder. Inside, you’ll see an installer titled BootCamp. That’s the one your looking for. For those users new to Virtual PC 7 and are installing Windows for the first time with Leopard, you’ll want to install the PC additions (in the “PC” menu) as well.  Now you should be good to go.

One Leopard Advantage:

There is at least one advantage to running Virtual PC under Leopard:

You can have a PC running in one of your spaces. It’s nice to be able to switch from a PC to a Mac on the fly.

Virtual PC 7 & Vista

If running Windows XP is a slow experience, running Vista is a glacial one. It’s slow to load, slow to respond, in fact, it walks instead of “runs”. But here’s how to do it.

Vista installation isn’t supported with Virtual PC 7, under Tiger or Leopard. The reason being is that Vista requires an ACPI compliant computer, a feature in a PC that Virtual PC 7 doesn’t emulate. Officially that is. Thankfully frgough of macoshints.com found a work around (you can read the full article here http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006060816033250).

Here’s how to do it step by step:

1. Set up a new virtual machine with the option of installing your own OS, and select Windows XP Professional when it asks you for what file system.

2. Once the PC is set up you should be at a screen reading “OS not found”.  Reset the machine through the “PC” menu and repeatedly tap the Delete key. You should be able to enter the Virtual PC’s “virtual” BIOS.

3. If you tap the right arrow twice you’ll enter the “Power” menu. Select “ACPI Aware OS” and change No to Yes. Choose save and exit.

4. Insert the Vista DVD or capture the DVD image, and you can start the installation process.

And it’s very long, long process. Setup takes a few hours, and you literally have to wait minutes to get to the next screen of the setup process. Once you get through setup, the installation will take hours. What I did was I went through the setup in the evening, and I let the install complete over night. Then you have to complete the setup process when you finally boot into Windows. Have patience. After Vista is installed, you’ll want to switch to classic view to speed things up a bit (and I mean a bit). Once your up and running and you actually get a program to run, the program usually is useable: 

 As you can see, it’s reasonably responsive. It’s actually quite usable. And… it loads Word 2007 just as fast as Word 2008 launches on my Dual 1.8Ghz G5. It’s depressing, really. It would have been nice if Microsoft tried to optimize software for us.

Why would you want to run Vista? Well there is some software that requires Vista to run. Eventually, most all Windows software will require Vista. And although it’s doubtful that Virtual PC 7 will be able provide the performance to run these programs anyway, I figure it really doesn’t hurt to have a copy of Vista I could run to try it out. And also… I just think it’s cool. Something about running the latest Wintel OS on a 4-year-old PowerPC machine just intrigues me. One caveat: for some reason under Vista I can’t get an internet connection. I tried coping the drivers from XP, but with no avail. If anyone can figure out a workaround, let me know.

There you have it. If there is any questions about this or your having trouble please let me know and I’ll try to help. You can reach me at powermacblog@gmail.com. One last thing: even though you can’t buy Virtual PC 7 new, you can get it used. Amazon.com has a few people selling it here:

P.S. Just for fun, here is a screen shot of Window’s Vista Performance Information score:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Emulation, How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.