I totally agree. I've built my own private WOW server and my wife & I enjoy soloing and grouping with each other. In fact we probably play solo more than grouping. It's kinda like having a single-player RPG but with a massive game world. Contrast that to SWG - a game we both loved (pre-NGE) and actually met online playing - the ONLY reason I play occasionally it due to the other players. Though there is SWGEmu and one or two other private server projects I think playing SWG on a private server would be a boring experience indeed.

You are joking, right? You don't actually BELIEVE this.

I was a Norton fan-boi from Peter's humble beginnings in '85 or '86 up until my last purchase of Symantec AV in 2006. It was then the bloatware pushed me over the edge when it made my spiffy new AMD 64-X2 crawl like a turtle on downers. After some comparative research jumped ship to Avast!. What I purchased at the time was the 2006 upgrade. About a year and 1month later I happened to look at my credit card statement and saw a charge from Symantec. And it wasn't their old $10/year to renew the virus definition subscription but was something like $25. I was furious! It's impossible to call them anymore but I filled out an online support ticket and to be honest, used wording that I myself would have just deleted with an F-U buddy! But about 2 days later I got a nice email that was quite apologetic and referred to the automatic renewal as a "convenience" but gave no indication how I was supposed to have "canceled" prior to the renewal. But they said they'd happily cancel my new subscription and refund my money. It wasn't but a few days later I saw the charges reversed in full on my credit card. Obviously had I not caught it they'd have been happy to rebill me year after year but I was happy with how quickly the DID respond to my less than tactful complaint. However contrast that to my GoDaddy hosting & domain name registration. Though they have my credit card on file and though I've set it up for automatic renewal (for both hosting and domain name registration), 3 months prior to the renewal I start getting reminder emails that it's time to renew and if I've set it up for automatic renewal then I don't need to do anything, and the email was just to serve as a reminder and notification to expect the charge on my credit card. Yes they're pushing me to renew sooner than needed - and continued to do so up until the automatic renewal - but offered discounts on additional services or things like an additional month. But still I knew full and well before the renewal that it was going to happen - and was plenty of time in advance that I would have had time to move the hosting or domain name someplace else had I chosen to do so.

No, no, no, the female draenei, with their sexy Russian accents!

What's that supposed to mean?

Before I went with VirtualBox I did some Googling on VirtualBox vs VMWare. Being a n00b to virtual servers I decided on VirtualBox. MOST of what I read said it was far easier to set up than VMWare but wasn't as sophisticated.

My hardware is a Dell Latitude D830 laptop (64 bit) with 4GB RAM. I desperately wanted to run Ubuntu 64-bit as my primary OS but this is my work computer and I'm tied to Winderz (32-bit XP) for many of our in-house apps as well as my DBA tool (DB Artisan). Wine sux IMHO so I wanted as close to real Winderz as I could get.

Setup was a breeze but admittedly getting the tunneling to work was a bit tedious due much to my ignorance. I needed my Winderz vm to have a true IP Address separate from the host OS. And since I take my laptop home on the weekends / holidays I didn't want to be dinking with static IPs.

However once I had gotten this all set up it is so frick'n stable. I do shutdown the Windows VM every night just like I would if it was my primary OS but leave Ubuntu (oh how I love thee!) up all week long. But it has never crashed on me or caused any issues with my host OS. It boots the VM amazingly fast. I couldn't be happier. AND THIS IS FRICK'N FREE!

Several of my co-workers are running Macs and Parallels for their Winderz VMs and complain about the constant crashing and hanging and sluggishness. I'm trying to get some of them to try VirtualBox but most would rather complain about something they know than try something new.

Oh well, just wanted to give my $0.02 about VirtualBox and no I don't work for Sun!

Oh and for those of you afraid to take the 64-bit Linux plunge, I'm running Hardy Heron and I have absolutely NO issues with 32 bit vs 64 bit. AND I get my full 4GB RAM plus a swap file. So my Winderz VM get 1GB RAM still leaving give or take 3GB for Linux.

Biking42