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Smug alert!

If you had one, you'd be smug too. I really like using my Mac to confine WinXP in its own little sandbox where it can't do harm to itself or anyone else. And the moment I get suspicious of it, I can just relaunch my clean backup. Instant pristine Windows again in less than a minute.

Yeah, I'm a little smug. What's surprised me is how rarely I run WinXP any more. All those Windows programs I thought I needed so much? They weren't very necessary after all.

But to do the same virtualization with Vista, you have to buy the high-end versions of Vista. With Apple, they don't force you to pay extra so they'll allow you to use your machine as it was built to be used. Just like with XP where you couldn't use multiple CPUs unless you ran XP Pro or XP Server. There's no great magic in doing this for Microsoft and they incurred no expenses to support multi-CPU machines. It was just an opportunity to abuse anyone who had the money to buy a multi-CPU machine. You'd think they'd be ashamed to treat their customers so shabbily. Whether one core or eight cores, OS X is the same price. And it's far lower than MS to begin with.