just do linux on an AMD Athlon XP. they're hell of reliable processors, powerful enough, i've been running one for 7 years, overclocked, broken heatsinks, treated horribly, but it still holds up and has a 2 year uptime. i think virtualization sounds good, just run vmware or qemu inside of a STABLE linux distro (debian, ubuntu LTS, slackware)

Just give everyone isolating IEM's with iPods, and they won't have to blast the volume and losee their hearing!