>>>Not directly investment related: regarding the merits of Virtual PC on Macintosh
Fugazi:
I'm in a Mac at home/windows at work situation where I might need to run Windows Word/excel programs on my MAC OS machine at home.
Depends on what speed Mac OS machine you have. "Might" is also a key word in your situation. I've got a 180mhz 604e. I'm quite satisfied with the speed for what I use it for (evaluating Windows software for consultation purposes). I don't have Office installed on it, but have looked at Goldmine, Wingate, and Accent's Internet with an Accent, for example, and I use it when I need to use the Windows version of Internet Explorer. I use Word Viewer and Excel Viewer to view other people's files. Anything slower than a 180 604e, and I'd probably be annoyed by the speed, especially if I had to use it regularly for work.
I typically have many extensions running, which slows it down quite a bit. With Conflict Catcher or Extension Manager to turn off unnecessary extensions, it runs noticeably better with a reboot. There's also AppleScripting and some other tweaking you can do to turn off your Finder or to boot almost directly into Virtual PC, and it runs faster.
If you are only interested in Office files, and you can wait, a better solution may be to get Office 98 for Macintosh (http://www.microsoft.com/macoffice/productinfo/getmost.htm) when it comes out.
For further questions on Virtual PC, you can email me personally.
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Sam:
If you get a G3 and Virtual PC, you will be happy. As long as you don't have a bunch of non-Mac-compatible PC peripherals, or plan to run Windows software that requires PC hardware, (and your kids don't expect to run the most graphics-demanding PC-only games at Pentium II speeds in VPC emulation), you probably won't regret the money spent to have "the best of both worlds." |
