Vista Basic, Dell Q6600, SMP, and VM?

[gnewbury]

Well I'm burning in the new dell Q6600 [NO OC] and expecting about 2300ppd w/ 1 client.
This is my wife's machine and if I get anything to funky going on it she'll just turn it off because she'll blame it on folding.
How hidden is the VM client when booting and running on Vista Basic?
I've read Tigerbittens EXCELLENT write up (thanks!!) but still am not sure of the best route.
It will have 3GB of RAM.
How stable?
I'd rather see 2300ppd 24/7/365 than 3300ppd 24/7/40. Lately I'm on long business trips frequently so I'm not home to fix the fold.
Any suggestions?

 

[Xilikon]

I'm also curious how to put the VM into a taskbar icon since it doesn't fully minimise and only have a taskbar button

With enough memory, it should not cause issues as long as she doesn't game.

 

[SmokeRngs]

One VM which wouldn't need more than 512 meg of RAM isn't going to make a dent considering the system has 3 gig. I have 2 VMs with 1 gig total allocated to the both of them with 1 gig left for everything else on the system and it still does everything fine except for gaming. Then again, that system doesn't do gaming anymore or even have a monitor hooked up so it's all good there.

I'm not sure how to hide VMWare on a Windows machine. It easy in Linux as all I have to do is close the VMWare server console and the VMs continue to run. I keep it open just so I can take a peek at them occasionally. I know on XP there were programs to hide stuff from the taskbar and either put it in the system tray or hide it altogether. I'm not sure if they have anything for Vista yet and whether it would work with VMWare or not.

 

[gnewbury]

Thanks guys.
It's not so much a worry about her closing it but I don't want to give her any excuse to complain about it.
I also do not understand why one would bother running VM on Linux, since Linux runs 2 instances quite nicely.

 

[Tigerbiten]

I can shut VMWare Server down so there's nothing in the task bar without it shutting down my 2x VM clients.

I've not been able to get the VMWare Server to fully auto-load at boot up.
I tend to start each client by hand so I can set its affinity to the pair of cores I want it to on.
Once thats done, close VMWare Server and the clients just chugs along in the background.

Luck ............