To move your mouse between the Mac and VirtualPC, you hold down the Command key. To get back into VirtualPC, you just click in it with your mouse.
If you connect an external monitor to your Mac, you know you now have two screens which can work as one large screen. If you move VirtualPC to one of them then choose (Command to access the menu) Control/Toggle Screen Mode (or just type Command-M), the VirtualPC will take up all of the screen it is on. To get out of this, just do it again. This actually increases video performance a bit since the Mac only has to only deal with one color space at a time on that screen.
I've observed that many people keep the VirtualPC on the PowerBook screen and do their graphics work on the larger monitor.
ð By the way, the VirtualPC emulates the PC color space fairly accurately.
You can do whatever you want, but you will probably want to keep the Mac and VirtualPC resolutions the same. Setting both to thousands works fine. Setting the Mac to millions and the VirtualPC to thousands only makes things go slower because the computer has to work more. How much you'll notice in use, I'm not sure. But the tech doc for VirtualPC said it would run faster like that.
ð By the way, independent testing shows that there is a negligible speed difference between running a computer at 256 colors or thousands of colors. There is a speed difference between thousands and millions of colors though.
When allotting RAM to VirtualPC, some RAM is used for the emulator. So the virtual computer will have about 20MB less then you give to it. You want to have VirtualPC run with at least 64MB of RAM so you will need to set the RAM to around 84MB to achieve this.
When we are setting up VirtualPC in the lab, we give it the maximum amount of RAM (128MB) to make it run as fast as possible during the NT install. You probably don't need to allocate this much RAM to VirtualPC so you could bring this down so you will have more RAM available for your other applicaitons.
Outlook on the PC is a better program than the one they have on the Mac. The one area where this really shows is in the Calendar. The Mac calendar works fine for keeping your appointments. It is just not very good at creating them. You also do not have the split screen to read messages in on the Mac. You must open them first.
Here is the big problem if you want to work with both the PC and Mac Outlook.
¬ If you accept a meeting in the Mac Outlook, it will appear in the Mac and the PC calendar.
¬ If you accept a meeting in the PC Outlook, it will only appear in the PC calendar.
So if you are using both the Mac and PC Outlooks for whatever reason, be aware of this.
Your VirtualPC is loaded with the minimum amount of applications for two reasons. One is that most of the applications that you would use on the PC are also available on the Mac. So the image was created with this in mind. We determined that you would probably be using VirtualPC for browser testing, MoTER, maybe Outlook, and maybe Visio (no Mac version). VirtualPC does not have the performance of a real PC to be running extensive graphics apps at the speed you want anyway.
The default for right-clicking in VirtualPC is control-click. For any of you who have a two button mouse, if you had set your right-click to control-click, it will work just like a PC mouse while in VirtualPC. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get the scroll wheel to work yet in VirtualPC for those who have this kind of mouse.
VirtualPC has a Save Mode that saves itself exactly the way it is for very fast startup. To activate the Save state, you can just Quit VirtualPC at any time. You are always presented with a dialog box asking it you want to SAVE, CANCEL, or QUIT. Save will allow you to restart back to where you were in a matter of seconds. Way quicker than the long start up process.
Do you want to save all the time? Definitely not. NT needs to write settings and changes to disk and this is not done when you save it. It needs to go through a proper shutdown for this. Also, the saved state saves the network settings which are dynamically assigned. Our NT server will think your computer is gone and eventually give that number out again. When you come out of Save state trying to use that number that someone else now has, you will have to reboot anyway.
ð Rule of thumb. Shut down VirtualPC at least at the end of every day and you will create less problems for it.
The Mac Option key works like the PC Alt key.
If you are only going to use the keyboard on the PowerBook and not an external keyboard, there will be some things that you won't be able to do. Well, one at least. Suppose you are using VirtualPC to create meeting requests. Some people, like me, add lots of conference rooms and then delete all the ones that they don't need in the Attendee Availability tab. Unfortunately, the delete key on the PowerBook keyboard does not equate well here so you will have to go to the Appointment tab to delete the undesired rooms.