For a while now I have been using VirtualPC for all of my development. I find it really useful to split up builds with devtools and my main laptop build that I use for Outlook, news reading, Office stuff etc. No matter how disciplined you are, you always end up with what I call 'devtool creep' where you start off only installing Visual Studio (or your environment of choice) but then you start adding SDKs, toolkits etc and before you know it your main machine is stuffed up with crap and its time for another rebuild. Of course now that I have my new Dell D600 laptop with 2 sweet gigabytes of ram, VPC and I are much happier together and I find that we quarrel much less. All I need now is a portable terrabyte RAID array to store all those chunky images on and all would be perfect.
Anyway the reason for this post is that I came across this article the other day from Peter Provost, another VPC convert, and it has some useful notes in it that I have already discovered the hard way.
Another good tip from Darren can be found here. I, too, have learned to hammer the ctrl key when maximising a VPC with alt+enter.