Well if your not terrified by a terminal window for some setup and configuring and having to manually install some of the required software you could get more point out of a Linux setup and currently I would recommend Mepis 8 beta 6 64bit. Its a Debian (Lenny) base distribution which uses the KDE desktop and seems to work very well and seems to be kept up to date very well. Most of the setup for the SMP and GPU2 client using wine for Ubuntu will be the same and they also have a easy script to install the Nvidia video drivers which were a pain previously. The a2 smp core is a thing of beauty ppd wise on 3.6ghz E8400 C2duo with 2 gig of ram a 2665 a1 wu 1920pts will give me a ppd about 2.1kppd where a 2669 a2 wu 1920pts will give me a ppd about 3.2kppd. Its been shown that the GPU2 client running with wine is pretty much equal on ppd to a GPU2 client running in windows. Also it does not take a core to feed the GPU2 client and no dummy plug is needed for multiple cards and GPU2 clients on the same machine. Another thing going native Linux vs VMware will require less ram as well so your two gig should be good.