VMWare has a fantastic product (for what it does), allowing you to run other operating systems on top of your Microsoft Windows or Linux OS. It is great for trying out Linux distributions, and the “don’t save changes to the virtual hard drive” option makes Windows fantastic for testing out service packs and giving the viruses a safe system to infect while you figure out how to get rid of them.
The downside is that VMWare is a bit on the slow side. (You think a “virtual controller” written in software would be any match for hardware?) But, it does run anything (just about), and with the VMWare Player now, you can do up a virutal machine and run it anywhere.
The one thing that I have had problems in VMWare is Gentoo Linux. (To be fair to Gentoo, it was something with the new Linux kernel.) It was the latest and greatest release of Gentoo, and since it was using the latest kernel, it was also using all the latest CPU and driver tricks as well. Apparently VMWare wasn’t aware of how to handle these newest tricks, and it just simply shut the session down. Upgrading my VMWare to the latest release fixed the problem, but it is something to watch out for.
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