Question re: Windows 64bit install and 32 bit emulation..or something...

[SUroot]

And you *DO* need a minimum of 8GB RAM, the fastest your Motherboard will support to make virtualization worthwhile.

Depends what you're virtualising, but without being specific, I would have to disagree with that statement.

Re VMWare: I thought the VM 'player' was free-to-use - i.e. you can get someone to build a VM on their licensed machine, take a copy and run it legally on your box ..

Could easily be wrong: it's a few years since I was involvement in setting up VMs ..

I can confirm that VMWare is pretty good and a complete piece of pish to use.

Yep, VMWare player is free to use so long as you are not a commercial user and to my mind, better that VirtualBox. VirtualBox seems to be more stable than it used to be and the scaling window is really nice but I cannot leave VMware. Perhaps if Oracle could implement something to compete with "Unity Mode" and I no longer needed to use VMware products to maintain industry standard familiarisation, I could be swayed but I don't see either of those changing tbh.