> Depends how many sessions of VMWare you'd want. I generally "budget"
> 128mb/session, plus 256mb for the base system.. (but I'm also a fairly
> heavy user).

I usually allocate 64MB/ea for mine; and commonly have 3 sessions (2 linux,
1 win98) spinning away simultaneously on my PIII/600/256MB here at work. I'm
really impressed by the memory management; and the one time I really looked
at it, I saw all 3 machines (mostly idle) only taking 16MB of actual RAM ea.

mind you, it made a *big* difference when I went from a stock RH 2.2.14
kernel to a 2.2.18. CPU usage dropped, and it freed virtual memory *much* better.

on a side note, the windows login dialog box will *peg* the CPU. ;> part of
this may be that windows hasn't loaded the VMWare utilities; but there's
more CPU usage than can be explained by that, I think. :)

testing stuff out in VMWare has saved my butt a couple of times; buggy
bleeding-edge kernel modules, buggy scripts that delete every file accessed
within the last day... if they shoot my VM down, all I have to do is grab
last night's backup. :) 

single biggest piece of VMWare advice: once you set up your Windows session
as you want it; shut down and tar.bz2 the contents of that VMWare directory.
end up as a few-hundred MB file. save that thing until Windows shoots itself
in the head; then blow away the broken copy of Windows and restore the
bz2'ed backup.

hmmm, since VMWare always shows the same virtual hardware, I wonder if this
could be used to circumvent WinXP copy protection... ;>

Carl Soderstrom
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700