In article <slrn4s49fk.ihh.aiyar at ebv.oncology.wisc.edu>,
Ashok Aiyar <aiyar at ebv.oncology.wisc.edu> wrote:
>In addition to these operating systems, you can also run DOS and
>Windows applications on Macs. Price is about the only reason I
>might still get a PC clone over a mac.
Well, yes, you can get SoftWindows, which was my main reason for
purchasing a Mac for our lab instead of a PC; there are Mac emulators
around (Executor is promising, but not there yet) but SoftWindows is a
reliable emulator. The main problems are:
1) No Windows 95 support (coming soon, though, I believe)
2) It is almost unuseably slow. We have a 75MHz PowerMac 7200 with
16Mb RAM. SoftWindows 2.0 on this machine can only supply the virtual
PC with about 5-6Mb RAM (which is nowhere near enough. Modern PC
software mostly requires at least 8Mb, and more is preferable). Worse
the 486 emulator is not efficient at all; this 75MHz PowerPC gives the
same performance (according to a benchmark I ran) as a 486 would if it
was clocked at 12MHz, which is just dreadful.
If you need PC applications, get a PC. SoftWindows is a good feat of
programming, but on all but the most powerful PowerMacs, it is just an
expensive toy. For twice the price of SoftWindows, you could buy an
entire PC that ran about 5 times as fast, had more memory and could
run Windows 95. Case closed.
Tim.