[bstar77]

I don't think Photoshop would be too laggy with modern hardware. I have some lag issues playing modern 3d games, but they seem to be related to game events that access the hard drive. I'm guessing this is because accessing compressed drives have some overhead.

With that said, I'd think the startup time would be horrendous unless he's just suspending the vm. The side effect of that is lots more HD storage requirements. So to make this as lag-free as possible, you would need to turn off hd compression, use suspend to avoid the windows bootup time and defrag like you would normally do in windows.

To answer your question, I believe modern Intel processors have virtualization optimizations built in.