Summary: Virtual Box just might be the perfect testing platform.
I'm now running Windows XP as my base OS, but I'm also running Ubuntu 7.04 and Vista 32 within XP. Virtual Box makes this not just possible, it's relatively easy, as long as you've got the ram for it. Virtual Box allows you to create a virtual pc within your machine and allocate it diskspace (which can expand dynamically) and ram. You can then install most OSs on that virtual machine. I had Vista and Ubuntu up and running in about 1.5 hours, and that was nearly all unmanned installation time.
With 3 GB of ram I've generally got more than I need for everyday tasks, so I can dedicated 512MB to Ubuntu and 1024 MB to Vista and everyone runs smoothly at the same time. Also, when you shutdown the virtual pc's you get the ram back for your host machine.
Virtual Box is open source and can be obtained here: http://www.virtualbox.org/
If you have trouble, be sure to check out their forum. The answers to all my questions were easy to find.
There are a few other programs that do this, one released by Microsoft, but I prefer open source whenever possible.
Sounds ideal right? Well, almost. You can't really do anything that requires significant hardware acceleration. So, no games. Also for me, I can't test the visual part of the Virtual Patient. The biggest benefit is, while Vista is still having growing pains, I can play around with it, without worrying that I'll need to spend time fixing it before I can get back to work.
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i never bothered having 2 OS's on my computer as the yield is not worth the effort for me... I did however put mac 10.5 on my dows box just for the sense of accomplishment (but not really) *and dont sue me apple, I formatted my drive last week!
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