You can boot to the Main OS, and not have to open other VM OS’s which leaves your resources at normal. Open one of the Secondary VM OS’s in the main OS and then you start using resources, VM shares all resources between all OS’s that are open in the Main OS. 

 

The nice thing is you could have an XP partition, and run Linux, Vista, or any other compatible progsinside of the Main OS, from another partition. That is file sharing at its best, and no rebooting. The down side is that if one OS uses 4 gigs and another OS wants 4 gigs and you only have 6 gigs, you will strain running both OS’s as a VM if you are to use software that makes heavy demands on the system resources. Of course you can just shutdown the secondary OS, and if you have a Primary OS like Vista, resources will be reclaimed and you are back to normal.

 

Actually you create another partition of the main drive, but could also use another drive to store the other VM’s. The VM software itself has to be installed in the Main OS partition.  Maybe you should check this further. 

 

I would suggest you backup your main drive, or use another drive to experiment with VM. I use Norton’s Ghost and True Image. If I do not like what is going on I just reinstall the old partition with software in tact and get on with my work. I do not use System Restore.

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