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Virtual PC

I’ve been using ieCapture lately to test my web sites on Windows browsers, and it’s been working great. There are a few faults though, mainly that you can’t scroll the page or interact with any mouseovers, and the service can be a little slow if a lot of people are using it at once. I’m certainly not complaining though, it’s a fantastic service and I thank Dan Vine every time I go there by clicking on as many ads as I can, but I needed something a little more flexible and speedy, so I got Virtual PC setup on my 12” Powerbook with an installation of Windows 2000.

If you haven’t heard of Virtual PC before, it’s a software application that emulates a Windows PC. The Virtual PC software actually only emulates a PC processor, and has nothing to do directly with Windows. You have to buy Windows separate, and can install any flavor of it that you like into your little “Virtual PC”. You can also install other PC operating systems like the PC version of Linux. (And by PC I mean an Intel/AMD computer).

I installed Windows 2000 because XP is bloated and slow, and because of the speed decrease when emulating a completely different computer platform, I wanted to have all the speed I could get.

I had heard that Virtual PC was pretty slow, but I am actually pretty impressed with its speed on my Mac. You definitely couldn’t run any 3d games on it with any playable frame rates, but for productivity apps like the MS Office suite and other general business applications, it would work just fine. It’s also great for testing web sites, because all of the browsers run very well on it.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have Safari running on the Mac, with a Virtual PC window open running Firefox, Opera, and IE 5. With a bit of hacking, I can setup IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 to run on the Windows system as well. This means I can test my sites on basically every popular browser with full interactivity, scrolling, javascript interaction, etc. all from a single Mac laptop! I could also easily install a Linux partition into Virtual PC and test sites on Mozilla and Konqueror for that OS as well. I’m still pretty amazed that this is possible.

I’m sure there are a lot of features and possibilities of this that I haven’t fully grasped yet since I just installed this last night, but even for the sole purpose of testing sites, this is a really great thing to have! And that’s probably what I’ll be using it for 99% of the time anyway, as I’ve never really come across a Windows application that I just have to have that isn’t available on the Mac.

The screenshot I showed is of Windows running in a window, but you can also run it full screen, so it would be like working on a regular PC laptop, even though it’s actually a Mac. You can easily share files between the Mac and the Virtual PC OSs, and Windows easily accesses the network connections as well. I haven’t tried printing or anything like that yet, but I would imagine it is possible and easy to setup.

So if you are a web designer looking for a way to test your site cross-platform, look no further than a Mac running Virtual PC. And if you have thought about buying a Mac in the past but were afraid you’d lose your favorite program, or have a Windows-only program that you have to use at work, now you have no excuses!

You might want to give MOZiE a try inside Virtual PC for synchronization of browsers.

http://www.zeit.ca/mozie/

You might want to try Windows NT 4 as one of your VPC’s. It runs all the IEs and is much faster than 2k or even the 9x codebase, under emulation.

Thanks for the tip. :) I’m pretty satisfied with 2k’s speed though, since all I do is run 3 browsers once in a while.