Okay, so a couple of folks, including John Troyer of VMware, have urged me to try out a VMware Player with a Linux VM as a better alternative than a Knoppix LiveCD to allow Windows and Linux to co-exist.

I have to admit that I haven't been a fan of VM technology in the fast for end users. VM's are great for server consolidation and development activities. But end users? They're slow, cumbersome and technically complex. You have to invest a fair amount of time in understanding them. And, the kiss of death to me, x86 CPU's don't support virtualization. This means a significant performance hit for the end user. And the cost is not low. A VMware Workstation license retails for $189.

John, however, assures me that there is significant improvement in performance and useability, especially for someone using VMware Player with pre-built virtual machines. And it turns out that several popular Linux distro's, including Fedora, SuSe, Debian and Ubuntu, have virtual machines ready for you to download.

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