Optimizing Virtual PC to play poker online

[joel2006]

If U are using Virtual PC to play poker on a Mac and find your computer slow or sluggish, here are some tips to get things running as snappy as possible.

1. Make sure U are running the latest version of VPC (check at www.mactopia.com) and the latest version of BOTH operating systems (Tiger 10.4.4 runs VPC quicker for some reason and for Windows this is esp. true for XP, make sure XP is the latest version)
2. DON'T give VPC the max RAM (for VPC 7 this is 512k), if your Mac has up to 1G of RAM give VPC only 256k, above that only 384k. (Giving VPC the max RAM will make it sluggish as this makes your Mac work too hard)
3. Go to VPC Help and type in "optimizing" then follow the instructions for optimizing performance (again esp. for XP)
4. Go to VPC Help and type in "fixed disk", then follow instructions to change VPC disk image from dynamic to 'fixed' (This will take a while, but makes a huge diff. in VPC's performance. Be advised that this will cause VPC to permanently tie up 15G of hard disk space.)

After following the above, if u have 1G of RAM or more, things will run very snappy and U should be able to multitable up to at least 4 tables at all sites, although Party might be a tad laggy. Also if you have 1 G of RAM or below, don't run ANY other programs while running VPC.

[Ryan Nagy]

Joel - I very much appreciate your post. I took VPC off of my G4 laptop about 18 months ago. Mainly because it was too slow. Now that I have 1GB RAM and your advice, perhaps I can use VPC to play Poker on Windows sites.

I am wondering how people go about multi-tabling on a Mac laptop. Should I get a USB external moniter and hook it up? I can't imagine playing more than one table on my 14" screen.

Thanks - Ryan