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VirtualPC 2004 Versus VMWare 4.5?
BackNBlack writes "Ars Technica has an interesting comparison shootout between Microsoft's VirtualPC 2004 and VMWare Workstation 4.5. Has VirtualPC improved since Microsoft bought it from Connectix? It looks as though VMWare is really the choice of those who can afford it. I'm also a little surprised that Microsoft is not as compatible as it could be, given the competition."
I really like VMWare. I have a dual monitor setup with Gnome on X.Org with Xinerama, and VMWare works quite well in that setup for running a virtual Windows XP box. I do alot of my Dreamweaver stuff on that. What it ends up looking like, with VMWare/XP running in full screen mode, is two computers, with Gnome on one and XP on the other. All I gotta do is ctl-alt and move the mouse over to deal with stuff on the host machine.
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I have used both of these extensively. I have had more problems with VMWare than with Virtual PC, but both have issues. Both have stability problems, and vmware is full of inconsistencies; what works in one version may or may not work in another. For example, RedHat EL WS v3 will install only in text mode in VMWare 4.5.2, but 4.5.1 will install only in graphical mode. SuSe 9.1 Pro simply won't install, at least when I first tried it 2 or 3 months ago, right when SuSe 9.1 pro came out. VMWare customer support is TERRIBLE; there is supposed to be 30 days support included. I emailed them several times and never got a response at all. The community forums are semi-useful, though it has far more questions than answers.
I would love to see a new competitor in this market.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
If you want to run anything but Windows on an emulated PC, you will most likely want to avoid using software... sold by the makers of Windows.
Isn't this an apples and oranges comparison? (Not that anyone cares, necessarily...)
IIRC, VirtualPC is essentially an emulator. VMWare is actually a virtualization layer that only emulates the hardware interfaces, but the non-privileged application code can run directly on the CPU like it would "natively".
This by itself should explain the speed differences, as well as why VMWare requires x86 hardware to run Windows, while VirtualPC can run on a Mac (which would be impossible given VMWare's design).
I'm surprised that no one is mentioning this.
Doing this [integrating VirtualPC into Windows] would make VMWare essential useless.
No. You could still use VMWare to run Windows on Linux, or other x86 OSes on Linux.
Also, is the belief that Windows will integrate VirtualPC basically as is into their OS? I doubt that. I can picture them making it into a compatibility layer that allows muliple OSes to run on some level, but I doubt it would intentionally be noticeable, and they may try to control it to the point that everything still looks like it's an XP or whatever app.
It took six hours to install Windows XP Pro SP1 under VPC. It probably took an hour under VMWare. VPC just seems to take a long long time to do anything, although it doesn't hit the CPU and hard drive as hard as VMWare does.
VPC is all eye-candy. This review was very poor - the bias of the author was clear from the start.