Mojopac

Congratulations, Mojopac. You have left us bitter and broken, but in the best way possible. For as much as we tried to find fault with, or otherwise break, your portable Windows virtualization software, we have returned from the war sans spoils. You win.

For a fairly complex piece of software, Mojopac is remarkably easy to use. You install the program onto any storage-themed external device—like a USB drive or an iPod—and that’s it. In essence, Mojopac operates as a clone of your current Windows XP environment, but the primary hard drive is mapped to the external device, not the connected PC.

It’s a separate operating system in the sense that you can’t physically access the contents of the host computer from “Mojopac XP.” Whatever you install in the Mojopac interface stays in that environment completely, never crossing over to the “real” OS. And like a facehugger, Mojopac’s operating system uses the resources of the host computer.

We fired up a FEAR benchmark on our test rig and found that the game performed identically whether we launched it in the native copy of Windows or in Mojopac’s version. Load times, however, will be affected by the storage device’s physical connection to your rig—USB, eSATA, etc.

Mojopac isn’t flawless. We couldn’t get the most recent version of DirectX 9 to install on our iPod-based setup. And Mojopac’s cloned Windows XP setup is highly limited, settings-wise. You can’t customize video settings, and dual-monitor is a no-no. Worse, Mojopac uses the network settings of its host machine, which absolutely kills some of our favorite third-party VPN software (sorry, Hamachi).

But if it’s any consolation, we found ourselves actually using Mojopac to transfer sacred Maximum PC materials between work and home after completing our review of the product. It’s a wonderful way