Q Is there anything available that will allow my Mac to run PC software? So much of the ham software on the market these days is Windows based and I feel like I am missing a lot. On the other hand, I love my Mac and don't want to give it up! Can you offer any suggestions?
A You might look into Virtual PC by Connectix. They have an informative site on the Web at http://www.connectix.com/.
Virtual PC can allow your Mac to run PC software and even Windows operating systems such as Windows 95, 98 and NT. The primary drawback is that Virtual PC is a very processor-intensive program. This means that you must have some serious processing horsepower (and memory). Virtual PC’s performance is determined by the speed of the Mac it is running on. The faster the PowerPC processor, the faster the Virtual PC. With current PowerPC G3 chips benchmarking several times faster than PowerPC 601 or 603 processors, you can expect the best PC software performance from the current PowerPC systems.
Connectix’s minimum recommendation for running Windows 95 is a PowerPC 604 processor-based machine running at least at 120 MHz (or a PowerPC 603 at 180 MHz) with at least 22 Mbytes of RAM. The minimum requirements for Windows 98 are a PowerPC G3 processor-based machine of any speed with at least 48 Mbytes of RAM. Keep in mind that we are talking about minimum configurations. The more performance muscle, the better.
From QST September 1999
