Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Virtual PC and Mac OS X 10.3

L

Lisa Moskaluk

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 23, 2003
22
0
Hi,

I have a 1GHz PowerPC G4 with 1GB of Ram. I run Virtual PC Windows XP through it.
My ongoing problem seems to be working my mic on MSN through virtual pc. I have given the PC 512 ram - full whack - but it still doesn't work properly.

Could this be the mic, or is there a problem of running hardware through this software?

Apologies if this doesn't make much sense, but that's the only way I can describe my dilemma. Whenever someone on PC uses their mic to talk to me, they sound fine then my PC just shuts down like it's over loaded. I have no other applications running at all on my computer - on mac or pc.

Any ideas or suggestions? Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks,
Lisa :confused:
 
Virtual PC is known to have problems accessing many hardware peripherals. Your RAM should be adequate and I don't think that is an issue in this case.
 
what about when the other person uses a mic and it still crashes? even if i'm not using my mic. could it be because the computer is looking for my mic?
 
It is more likely that WinXP and VirtualPC are having trouble with your sound card which you probably can't do much about. It could be your mic, though - I have heard of some very strange hardware conflicts with XP under VPC. Is it a USB Microphone? Is it a headset? Does it include a digital signal processor? You said that your PC shuts down unexpectedly - do you mean your Mac or just VirtualPC?
 
it's a USB mic - when the hardware wizard detects it, it tries to install then says there was a problem installing the hardware. An exclamation mark comes up over the device in hardware lists.
Just the VPC shuts down. Or sometimes just the MSN program.
 
The mic is your problem then. You could try a different mic, perhaps one that uses an analog mic input. Getting the USB mic driver to install properly without the wizard could be problematic.
 
what about when they are using a mic and it shuts down? is it a problem with my computer looking for my mic or is it just not enough memory for my pc to handle it?
 
It isn't a memory problem - you should have enough. It is hard to say where exactly the bug originates and what happens afterwards to cause the crash. However, keep in mind that all of this software is made by Microsoft(Virtual PC, Win XP, MSN). You could always try to get some help directly from them since they should support their own software. I suspect that some errors pop up in the software and XP is unable to recover properly due to the fairly unusual environment it is trying to operate in.

You might try to hack it by manually copying the driver files over to where windows expects them to be but you may need to alter the windows registry to make it work, which is no small task.

There is a better way. If you have a software disk that came with your microphone, it may have more specific windows drivers included in the install process that might have a better chance of installing properly.
 
One more thing. If all you really want to do is use voice chat you can try to convince your friends to use Yahoo or AOL and skip Virtual PC altogether since they should work fine between Windows and Mac clients.:)
 
Thanks...AV iChat only uses either mac.com users or AOL. No one wants to use AOL and PC users can't use mac.com.
Yahoo doesn't support audio for mac...not that I could tell anyway.

Thanks for your advice though, it's been helpful. I'll try a different mic and see how I get on.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back