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August 16, 2002
 
Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. and has been a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day. He spends what free time he can manage travelling the world. Photo was taken at Franz Josef glacier, New Zealand.

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Virtual PC 4.3.2 for OS/2

I reviewed Virtual PC 4.1 a few months ago. This month they've followed up their initial release with version 4.3.2 which addresses a number of issues with the initial release and adds a surprising number of cool new features.


Installation

Installation of the update over a previous VPC installation is straightforward, just make sure that you have shut down each of your virtual machines before you do the upgrade, or your saved state will be lost - the equivalent of pulling the plug on a real PC.

One new feature I noticed during installation is the keyboard monitor driver. This allows VPC to intercept Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Esc when a VM is active. The documentation warns that this might conflict with other keyboard monitors, but I don't have any to worry about. Once you've tried it, this feature makes VPC much nicer to use with other OS/2 applications and is definitely worth installing.

I was disappointed that the PDF manuals that come with VPC were not installed by the installer, they can be found where you unzipped the original download in the Documentation folder. As I noted in the previous review, the documentation for VPC is very well done and comprehensive.

What's New

While there is an obvious improvement with this new version being based on a newer version of the Connectix code, there have been a whole lot of OS/2 specific buglets squashed. From the length of the list in the README, it is apparent that the folks at InnoTek have been very busy.

DVD data disk support is a welcome addition although DVD movies are still not supported. In any case, you'd need some sort of super-PC to do DVD playback in software in a PC emulator like VPC.

SMP Now sort-of Supported

The new VPC will operate on SMP systems, however they're still hedging a bit in the documentation, so try it at your own peril. While it at least works now, unfortunately, if you have two CPU's, it still won't take advantage of them and puts all the VM's on the same processor. At least they're talking about proper SMP support in the future which is positive.

What about Sound?

One of my biggest complaints about VPC (since I mainly want to use it to run games and multimedia applications) is that most sound cards are not supported. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have improved any in the new release.

Very Cool - Remote Control

One very neat feature in the new VPC is the ability to run any Virtual PC VM as a VNC server. If you're not familiar with VNC, here's an introduction. All you need to do is start up VPC with the VNC server enabled, and you can connect to it with a VNC client from anywhere in the internet. The cool thing about this is that it works even for operating systems that don't have their own VNC servers such as OS/2.

Resizeable Guest Windows

If you find that your VM window is a little too small, the new VPC allows you to simply grab the window frame and resize it to whatever size you need. This is a lot quicker and more flexible than the previous technique of using Windows' Control Panel. Unfortunately this feature only works in Windows VM's. To enable this feature, shut down your VM, go to Virtual PC Preferences and Full Screen Mode, and select the confusingly named "Adjust Guest to match host" option. Seeing Windows resize itself automatically as you drag the frame is pretty nice.

Undo Drives

Another new feature is Undo Drives. This feature allows you to work on a disk image, and when you shut the VM down, you can decide whether to delete or commit all your changes. This is good if you want to repeat some testing from a known start state or are worried that something you are going to try is going to mangle your virtual machine.

Summary

As a free upgrade, VPC 4.3.2 is an unbeatable deal. It offers a number of very nice improvements to VPC 4.1, seems quite a bit faster, and knocks off most of the rough edges that the 4.1 version had.

If you've never used VPC, while 4.1 was attractive for making it possible to run Linux, Windows or other OS guests at all, 4.3.2 makes all of this a rather pleasant experience. If you looked at 4.1 and rejected it as too rough, it is time to take another look.


Virtual PC for OS/2 Version 4.3.2
Manufacturer: www.innotek.de
Price: Free upgrade for registered 4.1 users.

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