The first thing I tried, of course, was Microsoft's Virtual PC, that lets you run a whole Windows XP Pro (or the operation system of your choice). Over all, it was pretty okay, but far from anything that I would call responsive or even fast. I was a little surprised by this fact, as I thought a dual PowerMac G5 with 2 gigs of ram would be enough for another operating system. I was wrong.

I wasn't happy with this, so I continued to look around. I found iEmulator which is built upon the open source processor emulator qemu (AFAIK) and claimed to be a "high-performance PC emulator for Macs" (quoted from their webpage) . Hooray, I thought! Open Source Power! Yeah! I then found out, that iEmulator is not free. How weird. Oh well, if the trial period goes well and I like iEmulator, I'll pay the $23. But wait! There is no trial version of iEmulator. I was dumb enough to spend the $23 nevertheless.

Soon after buying iEmulator I found out why they don't offer a free trial version. Because it's slow. iEmulator is slow. It is slow beyond imagination. It is a pain in the ass. It is not usable. Even on my hardware which is not exactly considered slow. Windows XP would run faster on a symbian smartphone.

The point I'm trying to get across here is: Don't buy iEmulator. It is not worth it, it sucks, and it's a ripoff.  iEmulator is so very very slow.

So my problem remained unsolved. Until my simple mind was blessed with a brilliant idea: Use the thinkpad. I still have this old IBM Thinkpad with a broken battery and a display that does not display anything. But it has a licensed (!) Windows XP Professional on it, and apart from the display, it works. I activated XP's remote desktop support, downloaded the (from Microsoft), hooked up the laptop to my WLAN, and voilà, it works. And it's actually usable. I chose it over (Tight)VNC, because it is a whole lot faster and it also transport all sounds from windows to my Mac. How nice.

It's not very fast, but still faster than VMWare and it doesn't produce any load on my workstation. I could probably get a nice speedup by hooking them up via a patch cable, but I don't want another  humming computer in my room.

For those who didn't notice my subtile rants: iEmulator is slow. Don't waste your money on it.