Hi I would have to say the opposite. Years ago they were terrible and they are so much better today. I am in Australia and years ago down here MS where terrible. I built a system that replaced a huge amount of unix boxes in a multi national org and was screaming to them for some help and got nothing. In the end MS sold the customer 1000's of windows and office licenses as they were able to replace their major unix system with mine and I did not see any recognition. The big multi national had an account manager to handle the OS and office sales so my software was the catalyst for them moving to windows but got nothing. Any yet to me this is exactly the type of thing that MS should have been aiding an ISV to do. This year I started another company to do web based line of business apps and have found MS so helpful. First they got me a websitespark license and now a bizspark. They have had free training day events and thrown in hosting on Azure. So they key is to start a startup. I have heard people warn that after 3 years when the bizspark license expires that I will be up for big costs. But reality is that if I use Azure to host my SQL Server and Web servers I wont be as this software and the managment is paid monthly and if I am not making money after 3 years well it is time to start another startup anyway.

John I have been running VM's on both a Quad core grunter pc and my Lenovo t61p both machines have 4 Gig memory. I use VPC 2007 The pains I have found. :( No multi monitor support. This was a biggy for me and I believe vmware have a solution also Scott Hanselman gave me a link to some software that you run on both the host and virtual pc's but it did not work well for me. I have heard that new VPC ver will allow multi monitor support. :( Virus software. you have to run virus software on the VM this slows it down right from the word go and then there is the license cost. :( A little slower. :( Wheel mouse. I have a bluetooth mouse on my notebook which is great but the wheel scrolling will not work in the vpc I have tried other mice with no problems at first I thought it was the driver and then I found that a MS wireless mouse also had the issue. I am sure it is not a config issue as some work some don't with just plug and play. The benefits :) Backup. I just zip up the vpc file and copy it via network and everything is backed up. I can run virtual machine on either notebook when I am on the road or Quad if I want the grunt. :) No Downtime. I had an issue a while back where my notebook just died overnight and it took days to fix even with a next day warranty. I just loaded the VPC up to another pc. :) Mucking around. I played with VS2008 betas in VPC for a long while without having to worry about screwing up my real world environment. Lastly you need to setup your PC with some well organised shares etc. Prior to this I found I had docs in my host pc's My Documents folder and some in my VPC my docs folder etc. so you need to establish some practices here to avoid this. (I was probably just slack before hand) OzDeveloper