Alternatively you could just get Be Unlimited, which gives you up to 24mb/s and NO CAP for £18 a month. Why anybody uses anything else I have no idea.

Sam

Virtualbox doesn't just give VMware a run for it's money, it's considerably superior in many respects:

- It's open source
- The gtk interface is at least as good as vmware's gui
- It's considerably faster on my system (no hardware virtualisation), windows xp boots in about half the time in virtualbox than in vmware, and applications generally open/run much more snappily.
- It's considerably more stable (on linux) than vmware is. In my experience vmware crashed about 30% of the times I used it, I even got a total system crash once that needed a hard reset (I think due to problems with compiz?). It uses quite an intrusive kernel module that creates a lot of latency in the kernel. This manifests itself mostly as skipping audio when audio is playing. Virtualbox has none of these problems, it's rock solid stable and doesn't hog the cpu like vmware does.
- Virtualbox seems to need less ram than vmware, I only have 1GB of ram in my laptop and swapping was unbearable with firefox and vmware open, yet firefox, virtualbox AND other applications can coexist fine with only limited swapping.

That's all the advantages I can think of of the top of my head, the only disadvantage I can see is that vmware supports USB devices whereas the free version of virtualbox doesn't. Other than that, virtualbox is just better all round.

Sam