Re: [WinMac] Multiple OS Macs

cathyf@infocom.com
Fri, 18 Sep 98 14:36:43 -0500

>I'm considering recommending taking some of my artists to Macs with
>an Intel processor, so they can switch from MacOS to Windows at will.

You might check out Virtual PC or SoftWindows emulators for the mac --
they apparently work very well especially on the newer fast macs such as
the G3, even for very cpu-intensive tasks such as artists might be using.
They should really rip on a G4. You might take the Windows apps you want
to use and actually run them on such a machine with an emulator to see
how well it works for you. It might possibly be a better solution than a
mac with a pc card for your situation.

I use the older VPC 1.0 on a powermac 8600/250 with just Windows 3.11 at
the moment, and still prefer emulators to real pc's.... It's VERY nice to
be able to use my mac for everything else (even Windows 95 is a poor
imitation to an experienced mac'er) and just zip into VPC when I want to
do something in DOS or Windows -- being able to get right back into the
mac environment any time, since VPC is just another application and so I
can skip around at will. That means I can be working on different things
at once, even running around the net "as a mac" (much easier than as a
pc, in my experience...) while skipping back and forth to something in
VPC. You can't do this with a pc card, as far as I know -- you're in one
environment or the other at any given time. And of course, I don't have
any problem trying to fit in more peripherals this way, since VPC just
uses the regular mac printer, modem, cdrom drive, floppy drive, etc. I
don't know how this works with a pc card, maybe they share peripherals
also?

Another advantage of an emulator is how easy it is to shuffle files
around between the "virtual" hard disk in VPC and the regular mac hard
disk space, because of shared folders becoming "virtual floppies" and
such. I download DOS/Windows files with my mac programs, expand with
Stuffit Expander in the mac environment since that works better than on
any pc, and then just put them in the "fake floppy" folder. VPC also
allows you to mount the virtual hard disk on the mac desktop and open it
up just like any mac folder, this has been helpful also. I don't know how
this compares with a pc card, though, since I've never used one.

Definitely if you do have to reinstall Windows, it's very fast with an
emulator. On my 8600/250, it takes less than two minutes to install VPC
with Windows 3.11 from the cdrom (I don't know the times for Win95), then
about a half minute or less from the time I double-click on the VPC icon
to the time I see the multicolored flying window. You can keep other apps
on another virtual hard disk or fake floppy if you wish, to avoid having
to reinstall them if Windows has problems and needs to be reinstalled.

You might especially make sure representatives of the artists themselves
help make the decision about whether or not the emulator will work okay
for them or if they need a "real" pc or a pc card. On the one hand, they
probably need as much speed as they can get. On the other hand -- there
comes a point when increased objective speed doesn't matter because
you've already reached the limit for "subjective" speed. Only the user
will know for sure.

If you have the required on-site support for Windows machines in your
company and all your artists are on-site, then you don't have to make the
decision based on differences in support time/costs. I would suspect that
a pc card might be prone to similar problems as real pc's, but would be
happy to hear otherwise from people with direct experience. For
home-office-based artists, I would definitely recommend a mac with an
emulator just for that reason alone. I'm a free-lance scientific
translator, and definitely don't have the same troubles with my macs as
my pc-based colleagues have with their DOS/Windows machines. Macs really
do work right out of the box unless they are actually defective, and the
same is true for new peripherals or software or cdroms. Just simply
restarting takes care of practically every problem, it seems... It's
extremely rare for the system to be corrupted, necessitating a re-install
(and reinstalling isn't very difficult). In contrast, I've had frequent
trouble and frustration with the "real" pc in the office (now taking a
long rest) that has required drawing on professional techie support
entirely too often. This would be irrelevant if a techie were just down
the hall and you can even easily shift to another computer at the next
desk for the duration, but it's disastrous if you're "home alone".

I'll forward to you (and anyone else who is curious) privately an
interesting write-up of a demonstration of a G3 with Virtual PC running
the same apps as a Pentium II 266 -- the audience couldn't really tell
the difference, generally guessing wrong that the mac was the real pc.
But the real test for you will be your own users and their actual
applications.

                           Peace, Cathy Flick

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Sep 18 1998 - 12:40:53 PDT