[dennisw]

Thanks! Much appreciated. I have never used VMware or whatever it is called

[dayglored]

> Thanks! Much appreciated. I have never used VMware or whatever it is called

You're quite welcome. VMware is the current industry leader among perhaps four viable VM vendors (Parallels, Microsoft, Zen). To give you an idea of the flexibility this technology provides, here's a condensed list of what guest OSes I run these days:

• Host = Mac OSX (VMware Fusion), notebook
  • WinXP
  • Win7
  • Win2000
  • Win98 / MS-DOS
  • Linux (Fedora)
  • NetBSD Unix
• Host = Windows XP (VMware Workstation), notebook
  • WinXP
  • Win7
  • WinVista
  • WinServer2003
  • Linux (CentOS)
  • NetBSD Unix
• Host = ESX (VMware Enterprise server), big server
  • WinServer2003
  • WinServer2008
  • WinXP
  • Win7
  • Linux (CentOS)
  • NetBSD Unix

Of course, I typically only run one VM at a time on my Mac and WinXP notebooks, due to only having 2GB of physical RAM and dual cores in them. But at work, my ESX production machines are 8-cores with 32GB of physical RAM each, so those are typically running 15 or more guest VM servers concurrently. That's not a cheap setup. But Fusion and Workstation are pretty cheap considering what they do. And the Player app for Windows and Linux hosts is a free download; you can't create new VMs with Player, but you can run the VMs you created elsewhere.

I'm not associated with VMware in any way, BTW. Just a happy customer. ;-)