Virtual Pc Review

Virtual Pc 7 (mac osx) Review


As some of you may already know I have a mac Powerbook G4, which I absolutely love but it has some major drawbacks when it comes to poker. Many of the better poker sites Ie. Party Poker, Paradise, Pokerstars. Full tilt etc.. only have software versions for windows pc’s. In order to work around this there is a program for mac osx that emulates the windows operating system which is made by windows: Virtual Pc 7.

To begin with Virtual Pc 7 is fairly expensive ($130) without an included operating system and more depending on the windows operating system you choose. It has been argued that windows 2k professional works best with VPC 7. Of course if you have a windows operating system lying around you do not need to shell out the money for another windows os.

Unfortunately it is not as easy as inserting the VPC cd and installing it real quick. First you have to install Vitrual Pc and then install your desired windows operating system along with it. Installing Virtual Pc is fairly easy, but installing the operating system (I chose windows 2k) gave me some problems, I had to restart it a couple times and it took a little long (I believe 2 hours). Once I got it installed, it ran virtual pc and started up the operating system and it boots up just as a normal computer would.

I ran Internet explorer and downloaded Full tilt Poker and Bodog as my test poker programs (your internet connection is automatically transferred to the emulated OS, no configuration is necessary). As expected the programs run rather slow and sluggish.

I started by playing two sit and go’s on FT and noticed immediately how slow it was, I was forced to reboot several times because FT would lock up or the OS would freeze. I changed the setting’s to turn off graphics to improve performance, but the software was still sluggish and it was continually locking up.

I moved on to trying out how Bodog would perform with Virtual Pc. The results were slightly better, it did not freeze up nearly as much. However it was still quite sluggish and barely palpable. After pressing buttons it would take seconds to respond and was fairly annoying.


Quick summary
Virtual Pc is the only way for a mac user to experience the better and bigger poker websites, but it is fairly limited, very slow and at times barely useable. It has a lot of glitches and you need to reset the operating system continually, otherwise it becomes very slow. Hopefully they will make improvements in the newer versions of Virtual pc, but for the serious online poker player, a pc is the only way to go.