I don't know what these people are doing who are able to get this absolute piece of junk to work!! I have never seen such a waste of money. Two hours of fiddling with this amaturish program and I STILL cannot get it to install a program. Jeez!! How in the world can a company continue to sell a product that barely works for half of the people who buy it?!?!?! I thought, oh, I have a brand new powerbook, I am computer literate, I can make it work even if these other fools cannot. What a mistake....

I should have known when the easy install booklet was 63 pages long that there would be a problem. I am going to uninstall it, reinstall it, see if I can get it to work. But, you know, that is exactley the thing that I have time to do - mess around with an incompetant program that keeps crashing.

At $200 for Virtual PC plus an OS, maybe we should all just buy a $500 computer if we really need this stuff to work.

Just got this and unhappily discovered that it requires you to ALREADY own Microsoft Windows!

Well, if I already owned that, I'd have a machine to run it on. And I'd be living in the PC world rather than the Mac universe! And if I owned Windows already, I'd hardly want to buy a second copy to run on my Mac which would be, I assume, legally required.

So, it's now an inert piece of code taking up valuable hard drive space on our iBook.

Even the product packaging is mis-leading. It is titled STANDALONE and says "Run Microsoft Windows-based applications on your Mac" reinforcing the idea that this is all it takes. UNTRUE!

Note something else... this has to be the worst overkill packaging of any software product I've ever purchased. It comes in a large odd-shaped plastic container--over 9 inches tall and 2" deep. One then pops the top of that to reveal one of those awful hard plastic forms inside. YES, ANOTHER land-fill clogging plastic mess. It's about 4x the size of the normal CD jacket that's inside that. I'll bet that Microsoft thought they were being cool or Apple-like in this packaging, but it shows that they just don't get it--they lack a basic aesthetic. This is a waste and an ecological nightmare to boot. When will the industry and Microsoft routinely package everything in recyclable, gentle on the environment materials?

We should adopt European-style laws that require companies to take back all such packaging... that would rapidly change their behavior.

Based on the negative performance reviews - I almost didn't give Virtual PC a chance.

I'm a recent convert to Mac, having spent the last 14 years in PC/UNIX environments. Doing graphics and web development now, I had hoped the move to Mac would be fairly painless - and it has been, with one exception. Two programs that I use significantly are PC-only, and after months of searching, there's just simply not anything on OSX that has the comparable functionality.

And, when testing browser compatibility it's just as arrogant for Mac designers to ignore testing on the PC browsers as it is for PC designers to ignore the Mac browsers.

So, I was faced with three choices: 1) have a standalone PC for these programs, 2) have a PC but going through a KVM so I could use just one keyboard/mouse/monitor to switch between, or 3) use Virtual PC.

Number 1 was out because I just don't want a completely separate setup - and don't have the room. But I was heavily leaning towards #2 simply because it seemed "right" to have my two Windows programs running on a Windows box. Plus most of what I had read on Virtual PC made it sound like it would be unusable - it was just too slow.

(Un)fortunately, my #2 option above was proving to be a costly affair. A new PC, plus either a DVI switch or a new dual-input monitor was looking to be in the $500+ range. And there were limitations with that too - like no direct interaction between the two machines, not being able to use the Mac and PC at the same time, etc.

So, for $129 I decided Virtual PC 7 was worth the shot (I already have a Windows 2000 license from a previous system). The complete setup on my Dual 1.8 G5 (2GB Ram) took about 2 hours. And I was skeptical at best - I've used emulators before and they suck.

Wow, was I pleasantly surprised! Not only does stuff (like networking, shared folders and printing) just seem to work, but the performance is perfectly fine for what I'm doing. I can see where someone who was expecting true "Windows" top-level graphics performance would be upset, because you don't get instantaneous screen redraws all the time, and after a heavy graphics-laden screen redraw the cursor may be slow to move for a second. This could definitely make things like game-play and Photoshop problematic.

But for most programs, and if you're only running 1 or 2 at a time, the VPC responsiveness is pretty impressive - especially considering it's an emulator. It is definitely very usable - typing has no delay - and it never really feels sluggish that I've been able to tell. On average, VPC seems to take about 25%-30% of CPU resources when I'm doing something in it, but if it is sent to the background, it only takes about 1-3%. That's nice.

If your goal is to use VPC to run Windows on a Mac, you may well be disappointed. If your goal is to use VPC simply as a way to run a needed PC program on the Mac, then I think you'll be impressed.

One note. Once you've got your VPC up and running, copy your VM document somewhere as a backup. That way if you ever need to "reinstall" your Windows OS in VPC, you can simply drag this copy in for a clean "install" without having to go through the real 1 hour + OS install.

I made the switch to a Mac G-5 OS X about 13 months ago. I added the Virtual P.C. 7.0 on my Mac, because I had some Microsoft only programs that I could not afford to replace in the Mac equivalent or didn't have time for the learning curve.

I am on a 80G hard drive with 512 mb of ram... so it's a pretty powerful machine.

The Virutal P.C. 7.0 is "o.k." It does what I need to do and that's about it. The software runs about as good as it does on a p.c. (and that's not saying much). It's slow, printing is horrendous (don't even bother printing from the Virtual P.C.) and crashes just like on a p.c.

I think Microsoft would have done better to create Mac versions of their software (like they did with Office) (i.e. Frontpage and others) rather than try to pacify Mac users with Virtual P.C.

I give it about a 5 out of 10. It's o.k., does what you need it to do if there are no other options, but other than that, I'm saving my money for Mac software.. (i.e. Dreamweaver)

Setting aside the licensing (bundling with/without various OS configurations), pricing (continuing upgrades), and performance issues compared to older versions (if you have a G5, you don't have a choice), VPC 7.0 is, without doubt, one of the handier tools you can have in your software arsenal.

As long as you have plenty of disk space (to create the virtual PC hard discs) and plenty of available RAM (the more you can allocate to the guest system, the better), it's practically as good as having a second PC without the hardware.

Some of the niftier features include:

- ability to 'grab' floppy/CD images without having the actual physical media (use runtime Linux OS iso images without having to actually install, test out BeOS to see what OS X could have been like, etc.)
- ability to run multiple OS environments without having to disrupt your existing OS X environment (reboot, shutdown, reset your virtual machine with a click)
- saved state of guest OSes so you don't have to shut down and can pick up from where you left off

Some caveats:

- installation of guest OSes can sometimes be painfully slow, especially on slower Macs
- while Windows OSes seem to be OK, running alternative operating systems such as Linux will have trouble syncing system time after restoring from saved state
- less than ideal PC performance for any high-end computing (especially compared to Virtual PC 2004 on Windows which is quite fast)