 ben mord said ah in that case you can use something considerably less powerful than vmware all you need is a machine configured to boot from cd rom and use a ram disk for scratch space numerous linux distros are available that let you boot a stateless but functional system from cd rom but ram is expensive and the directory structures of many systems e g windows are not sufficiently organized and standardized to make this combination of bootable cds and ram drives practical even if you are fortunate enough to be using linux or another fhs compliant nix you still can t fit a lot on a cd its not unusual today to have gigabytes of static multimedia content on the web server this particular problem can be alleviated somewhat by using dvds but this is a temporary solution at best which will become outdated quickly as our data requirements grow and hard drives become cheaper so just write protect the hard disk for partitions that are static i seem to recall an article on this early NUMBER s byte magazine perhaps for bbs systems or for testing unknown perhaps trojan horse software george george dinwiddie gdinwiddie URL the gods do not deduct from man s allotted span those hours spent in sailing URL 