Run multiple OS's- inside your current PC! Too cool (& free!)...

I finally had a few minutes to test-drive the free "VMWare player" from the good folks at vmware.com- & it's very cool, very fun!

Unlike "dual-booting" a PC- which involves partitioning the physical hard drive & dealing with bootloader issues & other possible snags...VMWare's player gives you the freedom to test & run however many OS's you'd like without danger of somehow screwing up your "real" PC.

Basically, you download & install the player, download & add an operating system (OS) of your choice, & run it. Your actual PC is known as the "host" for the added OS, known as the "guest". These OS's are considered "virtual appliances" or "virtual machines".

What the player is actually doing is "emulating" a set of virtual hardware for these OS's to run on. It's like having a PC within a PC. The various OS's exist within a folder- whenever you want to ditch them, delete their folder.

You have options, at install, to designate how much memory (RAM) to allocate (the RAM in your real PC is utilized- so leave enough for the host). Depending on how much physical RAM you have, you can have more than one OS running consecutively.

You can set it up to auto-connect to the internet & you'll also have the ability to "drag & drop" files between the host & guest OS's.

In addition to the OS offerings directly from the Vmware Co., there are also community-built OS's available for download from the site. Once you download an OS to your PC's hard drive, just open the player & "import" the downloaded file.

Check it out- it's really phenomenal...