Rui CarmoBloody exhausted. My Windows laptop blew up on me right at close of business, so I just replicated my QEMU image into its Fedora partition and got back to work. Incidentally, running QEMU inside a 1.2GHz Centrino laptop with only 512MB RAM (allocating 384MB to XP) is doable, but somewhat slow. My desktop is a 2.8GHz box (I think, never bothered taking note of Imperial-issue hardware) with 1GB RAM, and it runs perfectly well there if I dish it 512MB.
If it were just a teensy bit faster on my laptop, I'd simply move the data from my NTFS partition, scrub out the native Windows install, and never look back. Alas, the trade-off between that and the edge that XP still has in power management force me to devote some time this weekend to fiddle with restore points (or worse, reinstall the whole thing).