how much ram do you have on the host and how much did you give to each VM
The laptop (Thinkpad T61) currently has 3GB, 2.4GHz CoreDuo. It’s set up for triple boot linux/vista/xp but it spends most of the time in Gentoo linux. I’ve assigned 1.5GB to one of the VMs and 512MB to the other. I have a 20GB disk and 10GB virtual disk assigned respectively. Both are running XP SP3. I usually don’t run the VMs simultaneously. The CPUs idle at around 4%. There’s very little paging unless I’m doing something very memory intensive such as a large graphics model of some sort. In that case a physical machine is more appropriate but for general every day use, the VMs work great. I’ve also virtualized two domain controllers on another linux server. The VMs are running Server 2003 Enterprise.