At the moment I'm using my 2.16GHz/2GB/120GB MacBook, with the WinXP VM doing some Win-only tasks while I FReep in OS-X-land. I had my Vista VM running earlier to chase a bug one of my users reported, and cranked up Fedora to try something out earlier tonight also.
My Mac Mini has all the above, plus NetBSD (so I can model and prototype my network changes before taking them live), as well as Win2K, Win98, and MSDOS.
I don't run them all at once, of course -- I could, in theory, but there's no screaming reason to, since I typically only bring them up to do specific tasks. And frankly the Vista VM really wants at least 1GB of RAM all by itself, so with only 2GB total RAM, I don't generally run more than 2 VMs at a time over OS-X.
I suppose if I had a bigger machine (MacPro, whatever) with tons of RAM, I could run 'em all at once, but I live off-grid (PV power only) and so small is beautiful.
Very cool dayglored. I bought a refurb iMac 2.8 GHz after almost 10 years on s PowerMac G4. An upgraded processor allowed me to keep going longer than normally possible in a graphics environment. I freelance on a client system that runs XP. It’s cool as long as I don’t add too much stuff to it. I have to “maintain” a small network (3 units) and keep backups (they would have run without any). Maintain means keeping anti-virus software up-to-date and occasional troubleshooting (mostly due to MS updates and web use).
It’s good to know that you can do so much off that laptop. I was worried that I may overload this thing. I figure I’ll fill the HD before I overload the processors.