Have you looked at http://www.dataevolution.com/ they produce the DECtop, maybe this product would help you get started today rather than two years time? In the mean time thank you for pointing out Nivos I am off to investigate:-) »

You forgot the decTOP in the cheap PC list at$99.00 its the cheapest in the bunch. Linux is here and has been for a while, it is already on the desktop, of a few of us, the question is will 2008 be the year of mass desktop Linux adoption? I think the answer is 'very probably' the price of the hardware will be the driving factor and this is the authors key argument. However MS won't take this lying down it can't afford to, the eeePC is going to have an XP version and MS could start selling an obsolete XP OS/office bundle to OEMs tailored for low end hardware at a give away price, the devil you know to the devil you don't, the average user faced with such a choice will sadly go the MS way. »

Hi Keith, I just made sure all the files where in the same directory and then I started vmplayer clicked on open existing machine and navigated to the folder and opened the .vmx file after this when you start vmplayer it gives you the option to open recent virtual machine, as vmplayer creates other files when it runs the virtual machine, using a dedicated directory maybe wise. I had issues when NOT running as root so now I just open a terminal su and run vmplayer. For information to anyone interested, my XP installation was refusing to boot, would just reboot and if I prevented reboot on serious error it would crash with boot_device_not_found error, I tried everything I knew and advice on the web, no luck. I was not too worried as I am a mainly Linux(PCLinuxOS 2007 for my desktop and laptop) user now and I could access all my files on the windows partition from linux, but my outlook pst file had some information I needed. Making the windows installation a virtual machine got everything working again including normal dual boot! So perhaps following the advice in the article to setup your windows as a virtual machine is worth it just for when things go wrong in windows, not that this ever happens:-) All the best Ian »