Microsoft Virtual PC (VPC) Pause Feature

I use VPC all the time.  Love it.  It makes my life… well, … it makes it good.

Using PowerPoint at the same time as a VPC image, however, doesn’t make my life good.  It makes it bad.

I’m sitting here “tuning’ my XML Features in SQL 2005 slides with my VPC of the PDC build of Yukon going in the background… and let me tell ya, I can type for about 30 seconds before anything appears on my PPT slide.   That is, until I tried using the VPC “Pause” feature… basically, this feature does what it says it does… for all intents and purposes I am able to stop time to allow me to complete my PPT’s without having to shut down my VPC for sanity reasons.  When I want to write and test some T-SQL, well, I un-pause… and villagers dance like its spring again.  I feel like a god somehow… the VPC image doesn’t “realize” that I’ve stopped time… when I start it again – it won’t really know about it except for … well, except for the missing time between its clock and the host OS <grin> - that could go a long way to describe missing time with respect to alien abductions though…hmmmm

So, for all you who struggle with using PowerPig (oops… did I say that outloud?) at the same time as VPC (which, by the way, has a reason to be a hog on resources compared to PowerPoint..) – Pause is your friend.

 

3 Comments

  • Interesting. Yes, I've been using that feature a lot too. But use it for different purposes. VPC just utilises too much resources at times.



    Oh, and when you just do the close and &quot;save state&quot;, it'll revert to that past time sometimes too. Which I kinda find is a bit &quot;funky&quot;.





  • I find the &quot;pause&quot; feature especially helpful during long OS installations. I can hold off on completing an install and resume it in the morning instead of wasting another 30 minutes sitting in my office.

  • Have you tried fiddling with the Performance section of the Virtual PC Options dialog? I've found &quot;Give processes on host operating system priority&quot; helps, and if not, there is &quot;Pause virtual machines in inactive windows&quot;.

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