[Ham-Mac] Virtual PC for ham apps

Sun, 7 Dec 2003 10:36:52 -0500

On Dec 7, 2003, at 7:07 AM, Tom Dove wrote:

>
> It appears that I'll be buying Virtual PC to run on my new iBook G4 in 
> order to test certain boating/navigational software that comes to me 
> for review in magazines, so I started wondering how well, or badly, 
> Windows ham software runs on it. I'm particularly interested in 
> WinLink for ham email while cruising on my sailboat, but also wonder 
> about other apps that use the USB port or sound I/O. I have a Keyspan 
> iMic.

I have run a Windows contest logging app (WriteLog) in Virtual PC on my 
PowerBook G3 400MHz Pismo using a Keyspan PDA adapter for USB-Serial 
conversion. It worked very well for rig control, but was not good for 
things like computer CW generation, maybe because of processor 
timesharing issues or timing issues on the USB port.

I've used the iMic on the PowerBook, but haven't tried it in Windows 
under Virtual PC.

>
> Several have suggested that Windows 2000 is the best bet with VPC for 
> ham use, since it's smaller and faster than XP but still a relatively 
> modern (in the Windows sense of things) OS. Do you agree?

I have to agree about Windows 2000. The problem with Windows 98 and 
earlier systems is the relatively small, fixed number of available 
system resources that are quickly used up if you run more than a couple 
apps at a time. Increasing Windows memory has absolutely no effect on 
available resources in 98 and earlier. Windows 2000 fixes this Windows 
bug and allows many more programs to run together without using up all 
available resources.

Make sure you have a lot of RAM and a very fast processor if you're 
running Virtual PC in Mac OS X. If you have one of the 800 MHz, 933MHz 
or 1 GHz G4 iBooks, you should do fine with Windows 2000 in Virtual PC.

Oh, and just a reminder, Virtual PC will _not_ run on a G5 processor, 
for anyone thinking of running it on one of those machines. The G5 
processor command set is missing a command available on previous 
processors that is used extensively in Virtual PC. Microsoft will have 
to extensively rewrite Virtual PC to make it G5 compatible.

73,

J o h n   B a s t i n           K 8 A J S
[email protected]         [email protected]
          http://www.qsl.net/k8ajs