The Virtual Disk Assistant is designed to help you make reasonable choices for your disk since there are various formatting options in the PC world. The Help section is beefed up and now sports an integrated Virtual Disk Assistant, Setup Assistant, and a built-in help system. Again, I’m not sure I see quite that much improvement - but it’s darn close. With Virtual PC 4.0, the hard disk space required is down by a factor of 2, Connectix says. Now Connectix has made the disk images “growable” so they only occupy as much space as the content they contain. For example, if you were running Windows 2000 in VPC and it had a 2GB disk image, it would occupy 2GB of space on your Mac’s hard drive no matter how full it was. Previously, Virtual PC had a large image file and a fixed size. The Windows disk image - a “virtual hard disk” on the Mac hard drive - expands as needed and uses only the space it actually requires, rather than a preset amount. VPC 4.0 allows the allocation of additional memory (up to 512 MB of RAM) to the operating system inside Virtual PC without quitting the application. I didn’t see that much improvement myself, but enhanced support for the Velocity Engine makes for noticeably better performance on G4s. Connectix says that Virtual PC 4.0 runs up to twice as fast as previous versions. Version 4.1 offers a big performance boost, expandable disk images, an enhanced user interface, and the ability to run multiple operating systems. You can drag and drop text and data between Windows and Mac applications and you can use the same disk drives, printers, and Internet connections. For instance, you can run Mac and Windows operating systems side-by-side. It isn’t actually a Windows emulator, but is a PC emulator - this means it runs almost any Pentium-ready operating system, including Windows and Linux, right on your Mac. If you’re not familiar with the product, Virtual PC allows Mac users to run PC applications, access Windows networks, and share files with Windows users.

Virtualpc