Another growing trend - Virtual PCs

It is becoming easier to setup and run virtual PCs. The software from Microsoft (Virtual PC) and VMWare (player / server) are free. There are also a couple of tools to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine.

So why virtual?

For one, its easier than keeping a physical machine around. The "overhead" of running in a virtual machine is not too much - about 10-20%. So if you convert an old PC running on a 1GHZ CPU, you can speed it up by running it inside a virtual machine.

The other reason is legacy stuff. I mean all the apps that you accumulated on your last laptop. Moving to your new laptop, you really don't want to repeat all the setup stuff and tweaks you did earlier. Also most of these will probably never get used, and yet you don't want to delete them. So why not convert it to a virtual machine instead?

Disk space is cheap, so you can convert it and forget it, right? Even then, you may want to save some disk space. One nice feature in the VMware Workstation 6 version (not free) is its snapshot and linked clones. Linked clones share the same resources.
Say you start with a plain vanilla XP install (VM_XP).
Next I create a linked clone and install Firefox on it (VM_Firefox).
Then I create another linked clone and install Opera on it (VM_Opera).

The linked clone feature lets all three VMs share the same Windows files - without corrupting each other. So each will have its own linked disk to the original disk. In short this saves you a couple of gigabytes in redundant XP files.

The snapshot feature lets you take a offline snapshot of the PC and its hard disks. Useful when you are about to apply a hotpack and may want to go back :-).

Update: Fast forward to 2014:
The technology that started here, caused Amazon in 2008 to start creating massive server farms of virtual machines. It was the start of the "cloud computing" era.