So there I was... sitting in front of my suped-up 6100, with VPC 4.0.2...................... and Firefox 2.0 installed and running!!!!! I tried several sites, and they all worked fine....... except for ones that made extensive use of Java, JavaScript, embedded Flash movies, or even complex CSS's. Performance either just slowed to a crawl (felt like working on a 10-MHz machine at times), or just resulted in a Kernel32 error (Windows98 side) and I had to restart the emulated PC.
It wasn't long after that night on my 6100 that I had my prospective eyes set on getting ahold of VPC 5.0 and trying it out. After some serious researching and finally getting ahold VPC 5.0 (with PC-DOS), I proceeded to install that and updated it to 5.0.4.
I set VPC 5.0.4 to use the current Win98 disk image that got installed by 4.0.2. It worked great! But for some reason, every time i try to run the VPC app, it always seems to force the "Control Strip" to launch. To fix that, I simply uninstalled Control Strip and its associated Preferences file and Control Panel.
I was told that 5.0.x should feel faster than 4.0.x, but I really didn't notice any difference, except for the fact that I had better, if not more control over VPC's functions; Pause, Resume, etc. Hey, anything to get my 6100 up to date with the times.
Another thing I noticed was that downloading large files from the web (using either Firefox or MSiE 5.x/6.x) on the Windows side of VPC was a HELL of a lot faster than downloading through iCab or MSiE on the Mac OS 9.x side of my 6100. It's strange but true. With my 3.0Mb/384KB DSL connection, I should at least approach 260KB/s like I normally do on my Compaq PC. That simply wasn't the case. I understand that having a 10Base-T ethernet transceiver acts as a bottleneck on my network, but still... if I can get speeds of 100 KB/s or higher on the VPC side, why can't I get those same exact speeds on Mac OS 9.x? It's just not fair. <_<
