| Home > Technology > Farewell Virtual PC, it was nice knowing you - kinda... |
| Farewell Virtual PC, it was nice knowing you - kinda... | | Date Created: 01 Mar, 2005, 11:23 AM |
 I have been a Virtual PC user since the days of version 1.0 when I picked up a copy from a San Francisco Macworld. It came bundled with Windows 95.
These were the days of a "beleagured" Apple, when things weren't looking too flash, and Connectix was producing wonderful products like Ramdoubler, SpeedDoubler and eventually its QuickCam. Logitech took that over eventually, and my only interaction with one now is when I enter the US and get photographed and fingerprinted.
I probably had distant relatives come from Europe to New York and pass through Ellis Island. How "quaint" it is that such traditions still exist, albeit with recent technologies.
I've used Virtual PC through all its incarnations, and it has been a great boon over the many years of use - it certainly made heads turn when I loaded it up on my first 15" Titanium Powerbook, in the days when no Wintel laptop had a wide screen. Many a Windows user would walk by, notice the Windows 2000 Pro desktop and ask what PC I was using. They were always astonished to learn it was a Mac and could run Windows (albeit approaching the speed of molasses).
Virtual PC saved my bacon on a few occasions when I was sent documents I couldn't open with an equivalent Mac program. This was especially the case with proprietary software, such as that used by travel agents.
Even my own national professional society for whom I edit a state homepage, still insists on using an Internet Explorer for Windows device - for want of a better word - for updating pages. I have put it bluntly but politely that in this day and age, that isn't good enough, and I hope they take heed.
When I purchased a desktop PC for use with my Virtual Reality/biofeedback setup, Virtual PC was relegated to very occasional use. It still came in handy when the PC began its slow grinding down with all the various detritus Windows gathers over the months of use, and on occasion I used Virtual PC to run the biofeedback app. in a portable setting on the Powerbook to achieve reasonable results.
But with a new Wintel Box, partitioned so that one hard drive does all the grunty internet stuff without mission critical software installed, while the other has the VR/biofeedback software, Virtual PC on the Powerbook hasn't been touched in months. It's taking up valuable GBs of storage with its multiple disk images of Windows 95, 2000, and XP.
Most importantly, with the Mac in ascendancy, the growth of both mainstream and more esoteric Mac software is being noticed more and more by the mainstream ICT industry, which of course begets more developers giving serious consideration to running parallel development streams for Windows, Mac and Linux, as in the case of Skype. Mind you, in the corporate world there is a long long way to go.
My present lack of enthusiam for Virtual PC can probably be charted to Connectix's selling it off to Microsoft. While some might have seen this is an excellent opportunity to see Virtual PC tweaked for maximum performance, I was never confident Microsoft would do much with it. And this seems to have become the case.
If anything, the MacMini has set the standard - it is Windows' users' VirtualMac, complete with OS and superb bundled software. Its performace is in another class compared to Virtual PC.
The demise of Virtual PC for me me marks a significant moment in confidence in the Mac platform, where I believe it can stand on its own. It has a rich support structure around it, superb freeware, shareware and commercial software - limited in absolute number compared to Windows, but oh so much better quality - and the momentum is with Apple right now.
So farewell Virtual PC, old friend, you did the Mac world proud while you were needed. But with very cheap Windows boxes doing mule work for me like downloading Bit Torrent files, as well as some commercial uses such as VR (where none exist on the Mac platform), I and many others will be using their Macs to do creative, interesting work, free of crapware and viruses. And leaving Wintel boxes to do dumb uninspiring file exchanges.
Sooner or later, even that passive work will be taken over by a MacMini sitting next to the TV, plugged in to both cable internet and home theatre, ready to spring into action to entertain and enlighten.
Mind you, Microsoft could surprise us all by continuing to develop Virtual PC beyond version 7 to one that will perform flawlessly with Linux and other open source OSs, such as can be found here. But I'm not holding my breath.
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