I have been busy installing a new laptop during these last few week. Got a nice an sweet fast machine with a 7200 RPM disk and 4Gb of memory. Now normally any of my machines are slowly but certainly wrecked by a combination of both writing new software myself and installing all sorts of software from others. Not that my software causes much problems (yea right) but all the other, including beta, software tends to wreak havoc on a machine over time.
But no more 
With a large fast disk, plenty of memory and a 64 bits version of Vista VMware rocks. I am basically settings up a separate VM for every project I am working on. And I am really happy with the result as I can really configure the VM as it needs to be for that project. No longer any problem when the requirements for one project conflict with another project. Need to work in multiple domains? Something that used to be a problem but no longer And when a project is done I just archive the whole VM as is for when they come back for more.
Enjoy!