I've got a much better idea.  How about a version of Windows just for business?  You know, one that isn't bogged down with Digital Rights Management, because in business we're more interested in getting work done, rather then watching HD movies.  And drop the high end graphics card requirements too.  Really!  You can do more with much less.

So do I really think that Microsoft is suddenly going to start producing products that businesses actually NEED?  No!

That's why I highly recommend that you give CrossOver Office a try!  Not only do you get Windows 2000 and XP support for your Windows applications, but you get great things called wine bottles.

Wine bottles allow you to have complete windows Applications isolated from each other.  Easy to archive, easy to restore.  One can be configured as Windows 2000, another Windows XP. 

On the CodeWeavers website they have many listings of Windows applications along with the current status of how the application runs.  Why give up your applications that work?

Windows 7 XP Mode Review — And here’s a review showing why you need CrossOver!

I found that, and many more interesting projects listed at distributed computing.

When looking around for a quicker way to generate Rainbow Tables , I ran into a distributed network computing project.

It is a great way to be a part of some very useful projects.

BOINC Stats only updates once a day.  BOINC Synergy updates every few hours.  All Project Stats updates the project stats every few hours, but lags on the total credits.

The answer to my initial problem was to simply download the completed Rainbow Tables from BitTorrent .

UPDATE: Unfortunately, they don't tell you that the Shmoo Group tables won't work without a little bit of work.
You have to edit the charset.txt file, and add the following line:

alpha-numeric-symbol32-space = [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!@#$%^&*()-_+=~`[]{}|\:;"'<>,.?/ ]

This is the same as "all" + a space before the closing ].

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.