My development server has been a P4, 1GB RAM running Red Hat 6. It has been a pain and a drain on time and money. It is slow (unresponsive), difficult to configure (point and click is nice, it would be nicer if worked), and all kinds of annoying.

But last weekend I picked up another used P4, 1GB RAM, and I'm running Vista + VMWare Player + Grandma's LAMP (Xubuntu, PHP5, MySql, phpMyAdmin, etc.). So far, I'm loving it.
Painless VMWare Player install, painless applance download, and now that its running I have a web server and Samba shares (easy fle transfer) without having to manually configure a thing.

If (like me, twelve months ago) you're wondering what virtual machines and the big deal is ... its a software abstraction of the hardware devices. From what I can tell, instead of the OS directly controlling hardware devices using drivers, everything is abstracted up a level; and manages to provide amazing performance benefits. Apart from the convenience (multiple OSs and testing platforms on one box), the performance is mind boggling. (Seriously, I'm completely perplexed as to how this is accomplished as it is contrary to the assumption that all this additional abstracting and computing would be resource hogs; but given the technology's starting place - MIT - and current status - patents by the library-full - I could probably perplex forever without approaching comprehension).

The conclusion? VMWare's Player is free, as are many appliances, and the benefits they provide are huge.