Virtual PC

[Mr_Mike]

Our IT guy has come up with as a solution for our PC jobs,instead of buying a new PC he has installed on older MAC G5 not the new intel
and has our preflight girl using this on jobs comming in. Now we have enough issues with PC job on our production PC station and now we got this to contend with Im worried about FONTS,APPs in this virtual PC world.
Has anyone used this ??? Im really worried my presses and going to suffer as things dont work right.
PLEASE SOME INPUT.

[kaiserwilhelm]

IMHO - RUN, do not walk away from Virtual PC
I hope your preflight girl has a LOT of patience!
We use the new Intel with Parallels. Excellent little program.
However, it needs a new Mac, and a beefy one at that.
Get a MacPro with some ram for $3,200 or so.

[G_Town]

Ditto VPC suxors hard core.

Typical IT solution put a big ole nasty stinky slow band aid on the problem.

Parallels works but if it's only the ocassional job why not just install windows via boot camp and boot into it when needed?

Either way its intel mac time.

[neotrog]

Hey. A lot of us resemble those "typical IT" remarks.

Let me ask, What's a PC job? What applications or document types are forcing you to use Windows? I've dealt with a lot of graphic artists over a lot of years and Mac-Windows has been little more than a personal preference. You may be going through more flaming hoops than you really need to. Even the font issues present in the days of Win98 and OS8.5 could be dealt with. I think it's perhaps easier now. More like fonts are more compatible but font management in MacOSX is harder and just about requires a good font management program like Suitcase.

Yes, both VPC and Parallels are "virtual" which means "almost like but not entirely quite." As for Boot Camp, if you've got time to reboot, you've got time to wait for Parallels and you keep your disk a bit simpler without boot options.

It's not so bad. I've run VPC and Parallels (currently Parallels) on my Mac laptops (way under configured) for years and it's far better than having to carry two machines, try to figure out which one I left a file or and e-mail on. I can bang between MacOS and Windows a couple times a minute in certain situations. I used to lose VPC about 3 times a year for unknown reasons but could just restore the Windows disk image file from my backups and get right back in it order. Parallels has yet to do anything unpredictable. VPC's shared folder was easier to deal with IMHO.

Relax, take a deep breath. You can have balance in the Ying and Yang of operating systems.