Running a Windows XP or 98 Shell on a Quad-core?

[kntgsp]

I had a quick question. Could the Quad-core 2.5 Ghz Powermac run the Winows xp Shell version 7 or whatever it's called, reasonably fast enough to run basic programs? I would assume with all that extra muscle it would be able to handle it much better.

Also, is there any way to run a windows 98 Shell on a mac? The reason I ask is that I have a printer for which no drivers were made after windows 98. They made Windows 2k drivers, but never XP. And the 2k drivers don't work in XP. Is there anyway I could run a Windows 98 or 2K Shell on a quad-core, have photoshop 7 open, with very very basic images, and print onto that printer? Or do I have to keep my PIII 500mhz POS for that? I was hoping I could consolidate. No biggie if i can't.

Help appreciated, Thanks!

 

[Josh396]

You could get Virtual PC for the Mac and run a version of Windows on it but I'm not sure about the speed. My guess is it should be almost the same speed as your 500 Mhz machine but someone else with a quad may be able to tell better than me.

 

[Dreadnought]

look at linuxprinting.org and search for your printer, changes are that they have made a driver for it. At least one that can hook it up to your mac.

 

[Flynnstone]

What kind of printer? what interface?

 

[mduser63]

Virtual PC should run very well (comparatively) on a Quad. VPC is not a multi-processor aware app, but because the Quad effectively has 4 CPUs, VPC can use all it wants of one CPU, still leaving 3 to run the OS and any other applications that are running. I run VPC on my dual 1.8 GHz Power Mac, and it really runs just fine.

BTW, VPC can be used to run any operating system that will run on a standard x86 machine, including WinXP and Win98. I've run several different Linux distros, Windows 2000, FreeDOS, etc in VPC, and they worked fine.

 

[dragula53]

hmm

are you asking to run photoshop and print in a windows environment?

or are you asking to host a printer via windows and run photoshop on your macintosh and print to the windows client?

I would recommend against using photoshop within a virtual pc session, as windows barely runs anyway, the addition of something heavy processor intensive like photoshop will bring it to it's knees.

And your printer likely has drivers for os x via GimpPrint (comes with tiger).

a powermac comes with graphic converter, which is a pretty decent editor, or you can download the GIMP for free.

I would strongly recommend against planning on using Virtual PC to do anything unless you have an application you absolutely must have that is unavailable in an OS X native format. The performance is abysmal. Don't let anybody try to convince you otherwise, unless you consider a 300-500MHz pc's performance less than abysmal.

Or, alternatively, you can wait until we have intel based processors and then run a windows environment closer to native speed.

The preceding are my recommendations.

 

[ahunter3]

What dragula53 said. Using Photoshop on the Mac, convert what you want to print to PDF...in fact, first hit the size and shrink the # of pixels to correspond to the output resolution you need/anticipate from your printer, unless these are small files to begin with, and THEN save the results out as PDF.

Then print from within VPC to your printer using the PC version of Acrobat Reader.


The only PC operating system I've ever had intractable problems with under VirtualPC is Windows 3.11, and Windows98 seems to install and work just fine.