Linux in Windows

I had played with VMWare before. The Windows host did not run the Linux versions that I wanted, and the Linux host would not install in most versions of Linux. I was able to get it to install once and it was very slow, especially compared to Win4Lin. I have been pretty discouraged with Linux lately, there are a lot of great things about it, but is is a pain in the butt to have to dual boot to use Windows programs. I have emulation software (Win4Lin and Codeweavers), but it is not perfect. I have Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX loaded in Win4Lin, I was using Photoshop to edit some photos, for the most part it was working fine, but the mouse was jumpy (not what you want to have happen when editing photos). I have been using Dreamweaver and it is just slow.

Enter option two- I discovered VMWare player. It is a free program that will run VMWare images. The cool thing is that there are free community supported images that you can download. So to recap, you can get a free VMWare player to access images and then download a community image. So it is like getting $200 in software for free. I was reading in the forum that you can download the beta create an image, uninstall VMWare, install the player, and it works. I have not tried this to verify it, but I do have an image of Suse 10 ready to test with VMplayer.

There are two cool things about using VMWare, first is that I don't have to reboot to use some of my Windows programs that don't work so well in Linux. Second, I can backup my entire Suse 10 image, in case I break it, the really cool thing is that I can created the perfectly tweaked Suse 10 configuration, back it up and install the image and VMplayer and any of my other computers. The downside is that I have to use Windows more than I want.
I discovered a good reason not to use Windows, again. When I was installing VMWare it asked me for a serial number. I did not realize that it had been sent to me via email, so I searched the warez sites for serial numbers. a dangerous thing to do, I picked up spyware that locked up my computer. I installed Microsoft spyware beta, it found the spyware and attempted to remove it, but that killed my computer, it would not boot. I had to reset Windows to the last restore point.