A collection of VirtualPC speed tips
Jan 29, '04 09:34:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
I run a design team with 15 iMacs that all have VirtualPC to run Access. While VPC is never going to be blazingly quick, I have picked up a few tricks that might make life easier! For speed concerns:
- Turn off your sound
- Increase your RAM
- Set your CPU usage to max in the foreground and min in the background
- When initally setting up VPC, make the hard drive sizes 'hard' (a fixed size, mine are 4 gig) rather than a soft one that fluctuates in size. Otherwise, VPC will spend half its time calculating the size of an ever changing drive size.
- Disable the VPCRCN.exe (I think that's right), which allows you to copy from your PC desktop to your Macs (use shared files instead). You will find it in Control Panels -> Administrator Tools -> Add/remove Components.
- Defrag your drive on a regular basis.
We have also found that if our network connection was cut whilst someone was in VPC, VPC would get itself into a situation where you could not log in and you would have to install Windows and all your apps again (which could take a good few hours to do). The solution I found today was to litterally replace the 4 gig Wndows drive file with that from another machine, and then relink the shortcuts (which takes a few minutes!). This gets you back up and running again much more quickly.
Also it would be good to hear if anyone else has any further suggestions, or if it is quicker using an old PC with Microsoft's Remote Desktop.
Comments (17)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040121134103378