Vpc 5.0.2

[Craig R. Arko]

New Rev. (5.0.2) of VPC available from <www.connectix.com>.

It promises many improvements, including performance. ;)

Early review, the installer seems pretty smart. The performance (on a G3) is such under Win98 and NT 4 that I'd still recommend renicing the app to -12 or so.

More later...

[Phil St. Romain]

I'm on Win. 98 and IE 5 now. It's better, all right, but still not up to the speed of OS 9. (Pismo 500/640/20). I'd estimate 20-30% faster than 5.0, but that's still not saying much!

Craig, for those of us who don't know, could you say a little more about how to renice to -12, and why this can make a difference. . . if you've the time. Thanks.

[Craig R. Arko]

How: well, I use ProcessWizard, which I downloaded after griffman mentioned it on the main OSX Hints site. You should be able to find it referenced at VersionTracker. It's a System Menu and very handy util.

What renicing does is cause an app to 'play nicer' or 'play less nice' about hogging the CPU.

Negative values ( -1 to -19) means an app does not play nice. Which means it will run faster at the expense of other processes. Positive values mean (1-19) an app plays real nice, and will yield the CPU more readily to other processes.

The default for most things is an even 0. So to give an app more CPU, renice it negative, less renice positive.

On my G3/350 system, seti@home runs at +19, Virtual PC at -15, most others I leave at 0.

[meancode]

here is a script i have found. change the 'xxxxxx' with your password

tell application "Finder" to set theApps to name of every process
set theApp to (choose from list theApps OK button name "Edit Priority")
set thePID to do shell script "ps -axww | /usr/bin/grep '[/]" & theApp & "'| awk '{print $1}' | head -1"
set newPriority to text returned of (display dialog "New priority for '" & theApp & "':" default answer "-15")
try
set theConfirmation to (do shell script "renice " & newPriority & " -p " & thePID)
on error
set theConfirmation to (do shell script "renice " & newPriority & " -p " & thePID password "xxxxxx" with administrator privileges)
end try
display dialog ("Changed priority of '" & (theApp as string) & "':" & return & theConfirmation) buttons {"OK"} giving up after 5

i used ProccessWizzard for a day and got tired of it, went back to useing this AS in my dock. its even got an icon of flash gordon, he he

[Phil St. Romain]

Wow! Thanks Craig and Ken. I'll be nice to VPC and see what difference it makes. One thing I have noticed is that it hogs much less of the processor when in the background. Would this be the case if a -12 nice value was asssigned it?

[Craig R. Arko]

Trial and error, Phil; trial and error. :D

PS - I'm playing with leaving the nice value at 0, and it's actually not too bad. It would seem that the adaptive stuff Connectix wrote to give VPC more processor time when it's the foreground app is working.