[ontos-on]

could you explain what VPM and VM mean?

[Swordmaker]

could you explain what VPM and VM mean?

Allow me.

VPM is Virtual Private Network... a protocol that allows you to tunnel through the internet from a home or other office to a computer or network at a remote location as though your computer were local to the server.

VM is Virtual Machine... the ability of a computer to run "alien" code (say WindowsXP on a OS X Mac or vice verse) natively in a window of the hosting OS.

The closest to transparent I have ever seen this was the VM ability of the Amiga (680X0) to run Apple Mac (OS 7 & 8, also 680X0) in an emulation window in AmigaOS... and it actually ran faster on the Amiga than the equivalent Mac OS did on a similarly clocked Mac by about 4 or 5 percent.

A truely VM ability would have the software for the host OS and the guest OSes running as fast as they would on native stand alone machines.

[Sunnyflorida]

"could you explain what VPM and VM mean?'

Sorry VPM should be VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. If you have a home/business network that is not connected to the outside world it is called a Private Network. If you want to extend this network over a public network like the internet you use what is called VPN technology. The private network packets are encapsulated by the VPN technology and encrypted. To the remote VPN user the private office network can be accessed as if it is local and to the other users of the public network they cannot "see" the private network. The Private Network I wish to access needs requires certain PC software (security). I maybe able to find a Mac version of this but I do not what to load this crap on to my personal Mac. Plus I do not want the adminstratiors of this private network any access to my private stuff on my Mac. Dual boot would work but a VM would be better.

VM stands for Virtual Machine. Virtual machine technology uses software to pretend it is hardware. Typically VM software technology allows more than one Virtual Computer to run at the same time on one real physical computer with the extra feature of allowing the user to bounce back and forth between the multiple machines.

Some Mac users are familiar with a product called Virtual PC. I have in on my Mac and I actually run a virtual PC with Windows2000 in a Mac Window. The performance is not great because Virtual PC must emulate all the hardware of a normal PC plus it must emulate the Intel instruction set. There is some thought that on the Intel Macs performance will be much better.