Because I had such great experience in the past with VirtualBox I downloaded and installed VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1 recently. And I must say that it just works flawlessly! 1. The Installation after downloading the Files was really fast, then 2. My Windows XP is as fast as anything I could imagine. I can actually have my Linux and my Windows XP running at the same time with no performance problems whatsoever with 2 GB of RAM. Ok I got one of those Intel SSDs (160GB) that might make a difference but I really give VirtualBox my thumbs-up and Qemu my Thumbs-Down, including my toes! I tried to use Qemu for a long time but (between the VirtualBox versions 1.5 and 3.0) and for the mean time I am back to VirtualBox because it is such a real pleasure to use it! Thank you VirtualBox! Thank you to DownloadSquad for pointing this out to me.
strange that there is such significant speed differences since virtualbox is based on qemu…