[drucken]

Vmware Workstation was first released in 1999. It never used to require hardware virtualization support until recently.

Also, 4GB is plenty for Windows XP. Perhaps you have not used it for so long now that you've forgotten, but it only ever required 64MB and ran perfectly fine with 128MB-256MB even with high performance apps. All that has happened since is a factor increase in memory requirement for a limited set of applications.

With Linux guest instances, it is easy to cap and keep very low the maximum memory usage. 6x VM with 256MB each is still only 1.5GB.

Without a change in software requirements, I doubt many consumers would feel the need to upgrade anything. CPUs/PCs really have been fast enough for many years now.

[DeepDuh]

Did you also update your XP to the latest service packs and patches? My updated XP in a VM currently runs at 780MB after one morning of very light usage. It has only one application open at 100MB.

Also, yes, virtualization wasn't always needed, but without it anything slightly CPU intensive will be awfully slow. I can see it working for CLI-only linux/bsd systems, but not much else. Do you ever compile something bigger on your guest systems as an example?