Here is my situation. I run a triple boot machine with pclinuxos as my main os and xp and ubuntu. I will always have xp for it's gaming abilities but I'd like to not have to reboot into it when the wife wants to work with her favourite pgms. She likes to use printshop and ms picture it publishing to work with digital pictures. And no, nothing I've found in the linux world will make her stop using those. So I want to use a vm in either of my linux distros to run xp and those programs in it. I would also want to be able to access the digital images that I have on a fat32 partition so I wouldn't have to copy them into the vm. I'm not adverse to paying for parallels and supporting the company, but I'm wondering what parallels can do for me now, and in the future, that the free version of vmware server beta can't. I've installed parallels trial on ubuntu last night and I hope to install vmware tonight to compare the two but I don't know if I'll have time to do a proper comparison before my trial expires on the 30th. I just thought of a specific question. The images we have are high quality and large from a 5mp camera. I have a good video card and very good monitor. How much visual quality will we lose looking at these pictures in a vm? Would parallels or vmware do a better job of displaying these pictures or would there be any difference? Any thoughts you might have on the virtues of parallels for my particular needs would be greatly appreciated.
