Virtual Machines for Encoding (VMWare / Virtual PC)

[djsdjs]

It seems like there are so many codec interactions when trying to determine what is going wrong with encoding.

What is the general word on the street about using virtual machines for encoding? Please keep in mind:

*) I already own VMWare and Virtual PC
*) I have dual PIII machine with 1 GB of RAM that can sit and run for as long as it takes to encode
*) I would not be trying to capture or output from a Virtual Machine - just encode
*) The machine uses a VPC motherboard which is stable on XP, but not if I mess with it too much (e.g. I can't turn on USB). I don't have the luxury of rebuilding it if I get too much codec residue on it.

Thanks,
D.

[Soopafresh]

I've used both products. They're cool, but in my opinion, they're too slow to do CPU intensive stuff like encoding.