I love VMware's Workstation - all the goodness and virtualization benefits of Microsoft's VPC (which most people reading this will be familiar with), but so much faster and more robust that it's almost spooky.

Only there's one thing VMware stinks at: 'pausing' your VM. VPC makes the whole 'save state' operation pretty easy, quick, and painless. (There's a bit of CPU chugging and some decent HD activity - but it only takes about 20 seconds - tops.)  VMware, on the other hand, makes 'pausing' painful. The pause process just, usually, takes about 20 seconds, but then you're sitting, and waiting for the machine to completely recover state sometimes for MINUTES when you go to restart it.

It was taking so long I decided I'd try shutting down and rebooting instead of pause/unpause. It was actually faster. Considerably.

Then I thought: hmmmm... Hibernating in Windows would probably scream. It does. I can hibernate and 'thaw' in seconds - it rules in terms of speed, provides a spiffy way to free up resources, and doesn't cause you to 'lose your place'. (The only issue, of course, is that network connectivity takes a slight jolt - but that's the same issue if you pause/unpause as well.)