Keep in mind that there are a number of aircraft in service that were *designed* and probably manufactured before the boom of mp3 players and cell phones. Newer aircraft designs are likely better in terms of shielding. Should airlines adopt a policy that for older planes electronics are not permitted for takeoff/landing, but okay for newer planes? How many travelers pay enough attention to the flight attendant announcements at the start of flight to pick up on the policy for the particular plane? Working with Automotive electronics, I have seen poor *new* designs in production that still show sensitivity to nearby transmitters. I assume aircraft electronics are at a higher standard. ...but also, could a $20 poorly designed mp3 player be particularly bad at EMI emissions? This is very much a case of "better safe than sorry", because if you screw up on an airplane, the results could be very bad. Besides, a forced 20 minute break from electronics is not a bad thing. And it's ONLY 20 minutes.

I have done something similar. Some points. 1. First pay attention to what CPU you get. Some Intel CPU's do not support VT extensions. Most AMD CPU's do. 2. I have always found better performance if the VM virtual disks were on their own disks vs. the OS, and then vs. each other, if possible. 3. I have used Photoshop on a Windows VM with VMware Workstation, and did not see graphics performance issues as described. VMware workstation is not free, but is not too $$$, and has some nice features vs. the free options from VMware. 4. Lots of RAM!!! 5. If you use an option like VirtualBox or VMware workstation that runs on top of an OS, I preferred and went with a Linux Host over Windows, mainly due to stability and CONTROL. Once installed, I did not do ANYTHING with or to the host OS. If I needed Linux, I would run a Linux VM. I also used a lighter window manager (XFCE) for host OS, removed unneeded services, etc. 6. I did run Samba and NFS on the Host OS to share files between.