SoftWindows 95 review

Not everyone with a computer uses a PC.

Apple is still in the top ten vendors of desktop machines for businesses. If you do have a Macintosh at home or at work, the time will almost certainly come when you want to use an application only available for IBM-compatibles. Enter Insignia's SoftWindows 95, bringing the joys of Windows to the Apple Mac.

Now at version 5, SoftWindows boasts a number of sophisticated features, like Microsoft DirectX, and Intel CPU floating point and MMX emulation. Setup is completely automated. The installer resides on one CD and Windows 95 on another. Once the basic software is installed, the routine not only prompts you to change CDs, but ejects the current one for you. A pre-installed disc image is then copied across to one Mac file which acts as a virtual PC hard disk. You can set an initial size from 120Mb to 505Mb.

When you first run it, SoftWindows makes you restart the emulated PC a couple of times while it installs special drivers for improved features and performance. These proprietary hard disk and display drivers have been crafted to integrate Windows 95 better with MacOS, but prevent the emulator from working well with other operating systems for which there are no drivers, such as Windows NT. Since SoftWindows now emulates Sound Blaster Pro and 16, audio drivers are installed during the first run as well.

Once up and running, SoftWindows looks and behaves like Windows 95. But right mouse button-clicking, as performed frequently in Windows 95, is not very well catered for. It's emulated with a mouse click and command-R or the numeric keypad's =, with no customisation allowed. You can, however, access the Mac floppy, CD-ROM, or any other removable drive inside the PC environment, and eject them from the Mac toolbar which remains at the top of the screen. You can also set up Mac folders to be shared with the PC by simply dragging them from the Finder to the PC desktop. This is useful as a means of exchanging data between the two environments. Should you find you need more PC or Mac disk space, you can expand or contract the PC disk with a separate utility.

On an Apple PowerMac 9500/132 with 96Mb RAM, I found SoftWindows 95 sluggish but usable. Previous versions have delivered performance no better than a 486. The new revision is noticeably nippier, but you're still not talking Pentium speed. Quake limped along with a miserable 3.8 frames per second. Terracide refused to run. However, Office 97 applications installed and ran without a hitch, albeit in relative slow motion. This is really what SoftWindows is best at - everyday Windows software.

It's worth noting that you'll need a Mac with a decent amount of RAM to run SoftWindows, especially with Office 97. And using Mac virtual memory tends to make things worse, so you must have the real thing. 32Mb RAM is a bare minimum for passable performance; 48Mb will give you the equivalent of a PC with 32Mb. Although it's pretty slow, SoftWindows is perfectly adequate for casual use. And with the arrival of G3 Macs, which are around three times as fast as the one I used for testing, SoftWindows really will make a Pentium class PC out of your Mac.

Author: - James Morris