Nick, I was looking at the VMWare website. I'm not really familiar with the product and I'm unsure of which one I would need to use. Would the free "player" allow me to install W7 on a virtual machine?

Is there anything I should be extra careful of while installing W7? Will it matter where I get the HD space from when I install it... can I instruct it to use a spare partition?

TIA

EDIT- Maybe a dumb question but after I install W7 in the VM will it only ever be accessible after I turn on the VMachine? Or will I be able to access W7 as a standard OS using a bootloader?

I really don't want to install W7 on C drive. I like my weekly backup images to remain at less than 3Gigs in size.