Drupal Virtual PC technology choices

I wanted a clean Drupal installation to wheel out quickly whenever I start a new project so I set about building a virtual PC. I've posted separately about the technicalities here, but here are a quick few words about my choice of technologies. The factors are personal and wouldn't necessarily cut it as rigourous selection process, but you have to go with where you are in the moment.

The virtualisation software - Microsoft Virtual PC

I've used Microsoft Virtual PC, VMware and Parallels and prefer the first. Of course, VMware is free and is very good, but I had a problem with it adding two or three minutes to my system shutdown (and, at one point, startup). It adds a whole bunch of background processes to your system startup and I personally don't like programs that use your PC resources when they're not running. I found Parallels works very well for Windows and Linux guest systems, and, unlike Virtual PC, runs under XP Home. Unfortunately my most powerful PC (the one powerful enough for my SharePoint development VPC) runs XP Home. This is why I paid real money for Parallels before setting up Vista Ultimate as a dual boot. But the Windows version of Parallels has only basic functionality and lacks difference drives in particular.

So that's why I'm using Windows Virtual PC on a Vista Ultimate partition of my main PC. Like VMware, it's free and I do a lot of work with MS operating systems and SharePoint in particular.

The Linux flavour - Ubuntu Server

I've used various flavours of Unix and Linux over the years. I went for Ubuntu Server because I had a previous good experience with Debian, on which it is based. In particular I liked the package installation which really makes things easier for someone who isn't immersed in Linux every single day. It's built up quite a head of steam and there's plenty of good support out there for it.

The CMS - Drupal

I've used Drupal because it offers a huge number of modular options, is very scalable, has a very solid support community and, perhaps most importantly, is now fairly intuitive to use. I've used Mambo (now Joomla) and found it pretty good and I've briefly test driven most of the easily installable (Fantastico) contenders with greater or lesser degrees of success. I really tried with Typo3, but just could not get past Go for the life of me. It's like some Mensa puzzle. Defeated! So Drupal for me, for now.