[REQUEST] Guide to Virtual Machines on Windows

Halp please with virtual machines, Running WindowsXP pro. Preferably free shit.

VirtualBox

Try using VirtualBox. VirtualBox binaries are free for personal use under their EPEL licence. They also have an Open Source Edition (OSE) which if you compile from source is under the GPL, meaning free for all use. Avoid VMWare Server on Windows XP Pro, it may install but it isn't supported and does damage portions of the OS during installation and uninstallation as it expects a Microsoft(R) Windows Server platform.

Enjoy!

Microsoft Virtual PC is also free and, depending on your needs, is actually pretty fuckin good. I use it as a sandbox with a mirror of one of our servers on it...I can piss around to my hearts content. :) Oh and Pr0n ;)

Quick simple, tiny (30mb) and free, MS VirtualPC 2007 SP1 . Hardware virtualization compatible, does not fill up your system with a lot of drivers, just one network driver per interface.
Install the VPC "additions" drivers to the guest OS once the base VM is built and you get drag and drop, copy and paste support between guest and host OS, and do not have to use shortcuts to get the mouse out of the VM.

You will need to find a VHD image online, or have OS media to install yourself.
Setting up a disk you give it a max size, and it will use as little as possible, vhd compression tools are supplied.

Doing things in virtual drives offers security to your host OS's data, as the virtual system is effectively quarantine , but does NOT increase your ability to hide data if thats your wish, forensics can still easily dig out whatever was on or deleted from your guest OS, in fact in some cases it can apparently make it easier.

Vmware player is small, free, but you cannot build your own guest OS vm's with it, only open vm's created by others.

QEMU! If security is what you're after you could run an emulated environment on that, since all accesses go through QEMU's hardware emulation first there's no way to directly attack your hardware if you're running services on it.

Combined with Virtuozzo (Windows), Chroot (OS X, UNIX), Jails (FreeBSD), Zones (Solaris) or SELinux you're on to a winner.