Re: VMWare, VPC or Bochs?

From: Mathias Rauen (borland_at_nospam-madshi.net)
Date: 03/09/04 

Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 08:36:12 +0100

> However, on the benchmarking results I saw VPC was 4x slower than VMWare
> (video). Also, VMWare beat out VPC in the disk IO stuff. Virtual PC
> just seems more sluggish to me (having used both with "snapshots" turned
> on).

Hmmmmm... I've not really run benchmarks to measure how fast each is. I
just tried to install some Windows OSs on both and didn't notice too
much of a difference in terms of performance. But for my needs video
speed is not so important. Maybe that's why we have a different view.

> I'd be interested to know what it is that you really like about VPC.

Just recently I got a VMware image from one of my customers, so I had to
use VMware again. What I hated is that even though the VMware tools were
installed, VMware sometimes (e.g. during boot) "captured" the mouse and
didn't want to free it unless pressing that special key combination.
With VPC such a thing *never* happens. Regardless of in which state the
virtual OS is (boot time or whatever), you can move the mouse over the
VPC window as you do over any other window. This sounds like a small
difference, but the VMware behaviour really annoyed me quite much.

Then in VMware you can press keys only if the input is captures to the
VMware window. Well, if you have the VMware tools installed, this is not
the case. But IIRC during boot the menu and in the BIOS it's still true.
In VPC you can press keys without needing to let VPC capture the mouse
first - even without the VPC tools installed. In general a VPC machine
window simply behaves more like a normal application window. It feels
just better for me.

Another important thing back when I evaluated both products was how I
could install the OSs. I have the setup files on my harddisk. For VPC I
was able to just blend my data partition into the virtual OS, so
installing the OS was very straightforward. In VMware I had to create an
ISO image first. That was very ugly, especially because it didn't really
work that well with the NT4 files.

Then VPC's simulated hardware (graphics card, sounds card etc) are
automatically detected by Windows during installation, while with VMware
you need to install special drivers for them.

There were some more things where VPC made my life easier than VMware,
which I don't remember right now... 

-- 
www.madshi.net
quality low level Delphi components
extended exception handling
API hooking, DLL injection
undocumented functionality

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