Hi Greg,
Switching to bottom posting.
Greg Kearney wrote:
On Feb 26, 2007, at 14:38 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
As you say the Pro seems impressive. My question is, though, how
good is the performance compared to running XP natively? Another
point, which devices show to the guest machine as is and how is the
latency?
Because the Mac now has intel chips the speed of the Windows OS is
the same as if you were running it under the native hardware.
Yes, it is the same if dual booted, because the Mac is pretty much PC
hardware minus EFI in stead of BIOS. AS you mentioned Parallels Desktop, I
ment, in my original question, the Windows performance under Parallels
compared to the Windows performance if dual-booted. Sorry for the confusion
and for not giving enough context, that's a bad habit of mine.
Virtualization is one thing I've been thinking, too. As I've said
earlier in this list, I do have absolute must have Windows apps,
too, so it is iether dual-booting or virtualization and the latter
seems much cooler to me. But one thing that worries me is latency.
It can be a problem in the responsiveness of a Windows screen
reader but especially in low-latency audio inside Windows.
I haven't noticed any problems with productivity software
That's good to hear and in-line with my experiences with VmWare or VIrtual
PC: the performance is actually quite good so virtual machines are usable.
However, most productivity software isn't real time at all. WHere as audio
software is soft real-time and in it even a 20 millisecond delay due to
emulation can be unacceptably long, if you have to play a virtual instrument
from a MIDI keyboard.
True, most of my virtualization needs aren't realtime at all and probably
even games are quite playable. the reason why I'm asking about latency and
the degree of soundcard virtualization is that I'm kind of hoping I could
use my Windows audio software virtualized under OS X with no need for
dual-booting. This is until they come up with an accessible Logic Audio or I
find some other accessible Mac MIDI seq and sound editor that fits my rather
basic needs.
I've used VmWare and VIrtual PC before and neither exposed the host
sound card. That ment unusably long delays in audio apps and some
weird pops and clicks in the WIndows screen reader, too.
This kind of visualization is not anything like Virtual PC that had
to create all the hardware in memory.
Umm, again, my bad. When I mentioned Virtual PC and VmWare I didn't mean the
Mac version. I've been running the WIndows version of VIrtual PC and the
Windows version of VmWare to run Linux and older versions of WIndows. So
performance should be roughly on par with Parallels. That is the machine
emulating a copy of it self which depehnds heavily on the hardware. However,
there still needs to be a thin emulation layer around, as else a virtual
machine could crash the host hardware, for instance.
Hope this clarifies matters.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
