I recently had the chance to test Virtual PC 7.0 on three different Macs: a PowerBook G4 running @ 800Mhz, a PowerMac G4 running @ 1Ghz and a PowerMac G5 running @ 2x2Ghz. The following tests will give you an idea of whether or not it's worth buying or upgrading to Virtual PC 7.

The first feature I noticed was the ability to convert older configurations to Virtual PC 7 configurations, I converted a 6.0 PC configuration and ran Windows 2000 SP4 on it. I first tried this on the 800Mhz Powerbook, the boot speed was a little faster but I quickly saw that once windows was booted I had almost the same performance as Virtual PC 6.0. The PowerMac G4 didn't do much better at this either, with similar loading time and similar performance to the PowerBook. The PowerMac G5 booted much faster however, and delivered performance similar to a PC running at around 600-700Mhz, that didn't have any 3D graphic acceleration. This clock speed value is probably not reliable yet however as an emulator can't provide stable performance, but it gives you an idea of how fast it was. The disk performance in reading/writing is still slower than a real PC though, and this becomes very annoying especially when working with large files or during an installation process.

I ran many applications to see if they were more usable on this new version. I tried Office 2000, Money 2000 and Internet Explorer which had acceptable performance on any of the Macs I used for the tests. I also tested Visual Studio .NET 2003 which only became usable on the PowerMac G5. I tested Photoshop which was surprisingly usable on the G5 and finally I tested Half Life which I had to quit before I got to to playing the game. Now guess which was the longest task, installing them!

The only new feature I found in the preferences window is that the it has a new section that let's you chose which icons will appear on the toolbar. However I did notice that we can now install the Virtual PC additions, or transfer files from a PC through the "PC" menu, this feature used to be in a toolbar icon. We can notice some minor changes like the fact we cannot change the CPU usage in the foreground any longer or that it is now possible to launch Virtual PC at startup.

On the PC configuration settings, the CD/DVD section has disappeared, probably because it was not very useful to ask if you want to boot from CD or if you want a standard IDE configuration, while a new section called Printing has appeared, allowing you to chose the default Mac printer that will be used on the PC environment.

Microsoft also advertised that Virtual PC 7 had better management of USB. My unique test for USB was to try to make my Logitech QuickCam Zoom work with MSN Messenger 6.2. Virtual PC recognized the web cam but couldn't communicate with it. In the device properties, the status field reported "The device cannot start. (Code 10)". So, as you see, there still isn't full USB support on the emulated PC.

A quick look on Windows Device Manager made me realize that this new version of Virtual PC won't natively recognize any new component of the Mac. For example I was hoping that it would recognize the CD/DVD burner but it only saw it as a "MS C/DVD-ROM drive" which is not so bad after all, as it can mount DVDs.

Of course, the graphics are still based on the emulated S3 Trio32/64 chip which offers a maximum of 16Mb of VRAM and isn't yet emulated by the Mac's graphic chip, but by the processor which means Virtual PC 7 still has poor graphics performance.
As you guess, I'm a bit disappointed about this very long awaited 7th version, of Virtual PC and I'm sure many of you are too, after reading this report. At least you know that the only new features of Virtual PC 7 are backward compatibility with older Virtual PC configurations, easier file transfer between the Mac and the PC environment, some slight interface improvements, and G5/DP compatibility. The last feature is probably the only reason that would make me buy Virtual PC 7 and that is if I owned a G5 and if I needed PC emulation.

What this emulator needs now is true support of some crucial components that are standard on any Mac like its graphic chip or its FireWire controller. Virtual PC's USB support and I/O performance must also be improved and it wouldn't hurt to have support for the internal CD or DVD burner. All of this is technically possible to do, so we can have hope they'll appear in next few releases of Virtual PC. Especially in the case of native graphic chip support which has recently been subject to rumors.

The upgrade to Virtual PC 7.0 costs $79 while the complete version costs $109, they do not include Windows though. As you see it's not a very expensive peace of software, so if you have just bought a G5 a want to be able to run some PC applications that are not graphic intensive, it'll just do what it is supposed to. However, I wouldn't suggest G4 users of Virtual PC 6.0 to upgrade at least until the next version comes.