Originally posted by Azrikam
Again, anecdotally, a friend of mine is a freelance computer support guy and he swears that running XP on a Mac in emulation is more stable than running XP on its own.
Thats just patently ridiculous - there is no way that XP would be 'more' stable running on an emulator:
quick explination - at the bottom of the stack you have hardware
mac and pc hardware are for all intents and purposes are as likely to run perfectly fine for years constant uptime as each other.
example - just look on the web at some of the linux operating system boxes .... they have been running apache web server constantly without faults ..... and linux boxes are in the majority the very same pc's that you would install windows on should the mood take you.
Then its up to the operating system - a correctly installed system thats patched and maintained correctly should run perfectly fine and without errors be it mac os or windows XP. I can leave my windows XP on for weeks at a time and not expect to see a crash.
..... but regardless of how well they stay up, because software and programming is envolved there are always errors regardless of which OS.
In the case of the mac - it has to now run emulation software ontop of its OS - its never going to be 100% stable - no software is. The more code the more possible problems - and trying to emultate a pc and deal with system calls and hooks is not an easy things to keep stable - as you can't account for every piece of software run against it.
.... then ontop of the emulator you have to have XP itself - and the software you wish to run on that XP.
You should be able to work out for yourself from the above why haveing a straight operating system tied directly to native hardware is always going to be more stable than having to run software ontop of software along with it ontop of non native hardware. The possibilty of errors increase exponentially the more layers of software you add.
Theres always the possibilty of someone trying to throw in the excuse of pc's having differing hardware - but as long as the correct drivers are installed this is pretty much a redundant issue <- see linux box uptime for examples of this.
Originally posted by Daftboy
There's an old joke about Windows and Mac's.
"Whats the quickest computer for Windows?"
"A Mac"
It's true, I've seen the evidence, but I hate Macs.
Simply not true - I sugguest re checking what you read or heard - no mac can emulate windows quicker than a dedicated native box
..... and also emulators can't fully replace a windows box for the simple reason that they can't run all the software - they emulate reasonably well now adays, but there are plenty of software titles that cause majour compatablity issues - like ones expecting to talk to specific graphics hardware.
comparison of Power Mac G5 vs Amd Athlon 64
^ thats not even the fastest Amd Athlon processor available and neither is it mac's trying to run Windows software on an emulator - thats native software for both operatings systems.