Virtual PC 7 any good?

Question

Hi there, I am in the process of purchasing new workstations and server for our office (replacing our whole network). There are 2 schools of thought, that we should go all Mac or all PC. The all Mac side is just me! Right now we have a horrible mixed network architecture and really old machines. I want to keep things as clean, simple and robust as possible.
The Mac network would consist of 2-3 workstations running the latest version of OS X and a server running OS X Server v10.4. The WSs would have to use Virtual PC in order to run the accounting sw package. My question is this - is it any good? Does one have to start the VPC before starting the windows sw. Where would the program files physically reside on the hard disk? Can you create aliases for these to put on the 'desktop'? I had some mixed experiences running 10.4.x on an old G4 (which had a hw problem with the processor or one of the boards) and OS 9 emulator, as it kept crashing all the time. The machine later totally died anyway, so the problems may well have arisen from this hw issue. I guess I'd have to wait for Microsoft Office 2008 to come out and use OpenOffice in the interim (we have some nasty formatted sales documents and leaflets that won't work very well in OpenOffice).
If we were to buy PCs, then we were looking at using either W*ndows V*sta Business/Ultimate or W*ndows XP Professional on the workstations, and putting ubuntu linux on the server. I am a bit concerned about all the aggravation that I might get re anti-virus sw and anti-spyware, as one has to keep removing this constantly with PCs. I also don't like giving money to Microsoft lol
Any thoughts or experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks.
Best
Pat

Answer 1

New Macs can't run VirtualPC at all. So if one of the new machines is a Mac, you'll want to get Boot Camp, VMWare, Parallels, or one of the Intel Mac solutions on my FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/macosxnative.html#WINTEL
VirtualPC is designed for use on your G5, and is no longer supported, but should work fine for any accounting package. The place where VirtualPC falls down is when you have insufficient RAM or hard disk space allocated to it for the version of Windows you use, which you'll also see in my FAQ above.
You may even find CrossOver on a new Mac can run your accounting package without installing any Windows whatsoever, and be more secure.
Or you may find a version of an accounting package for the Mac that will run your accounting data without installing any Windows software on your Mac. See alternatives to OpenOffice on my FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/crossplatform.html
One can create aliases on the desktop for VirtualPC, though VirtualPC's software has to start up on its own. Boot Camp is a separate boot software
Note: Intel is not G5, and rather is IBM. So that's a distinction you should make. All new Macs are Intel. Your profile says you have G5s which are now a generation older than what is out there.
Viruses are almost unheard of on the Mac, and most people won't ever see a virus, unless they have to run Windows on the Mac. Your best bet is to tell that to your CIO, and tell them they'd have much lower support costs getting an all Mac network, as no anti-virus installations will be necessary and Macs for the most part just run. This FAQ page goes over those costs:
http://www.macvspc.info/
- * Links to my page may give me compensation.