[ozbear]

I think the key things are:
1) Whether this virtualisation gizmo ensures that all my old programs work and
2) what kind of performace hit running them in that mode incurs

Most of Joe Sixpack's applications are just not CPU hungry...word processing, email, web surfing. Games are a different story but those kinds of apps I would think would be of the "disposable" kind (i.e., they aren't huge investments, after you've completed it, it becomes shelfware) and the games industry seems pretty adaptable to generating games for multiple platforms/operating systems, so just add Windows 7 to the list.

I don't particularly care if my MS Outlook 2003 email program runs more slowly since it isn't a performance application. Ditto with the majority of my applications. However, if virtualisation is going to require significantly more time to load the applications and if I am going to get pauses between keyboard presses then that is going to be an issue, for me.

Oz