MSimon wrote:I have seen Windoze 7 boxes with 3 GB.
3GB is a the maximum accessible with 32-bit MS Windows, so there is no point putting in more.
Is the 6 GB that comes with the box a serious limitation? 2 GB came with my XP machine and I never upgraded it. It worked fine for what I did.
Not serious, not now - maybe later. Current CPUs are hideously overpowered. hard drives are massive and easy to expand. RAM is typically the limiting factor as applications seem to "grow" with all the added fluff od "easier programming." PC lifecycle used to be 3 years. Now its more like 5-7 years. Are you likely to run any Polywell finite-element simmulations in that time? RAM might be the limiting factor (pure speculation from my lack of experience in such simmulations)
And tell me more about VMware I went to their site and the amount of flakery was horrendous. And the verbiage was impenetrable. And I couldn't figure out at all what the heck they were selling.
VMWare are the beez-kneez of virtualisation. They created the market 10 years ago and everyone else is still trying to catch up. As others have tried to catch up by offering their free(as in beer) alternatives (VirtualPC,Virtualbox,Xen), VMWare has responded by releasing their original products for free also. VMWare makes their money from the advance features - such of "live" migrations of running systems from one piece of hardware to another - pretty amazing stuff; "bare metal" hypervisors (no host OS); and also enterprise management of hundreds of virtual machines in a datacentre.
I hadn't checked their home page for a while, and now its heavily aimed at the enterprise level.
Wikipediaprobably provides a simpler overview now. Scroll down to check out "Products." What you want is VMWare Player.
VMWare have also developed a
"marketplace" where pre-installed and configured applications are packaged as a virtual machine that you can download and run. Some random examples:
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.