Have you ever installed an application in Microsoft Windows only to have the installer trash your Windows installation? I have. More than once.  
 
It's bad enough that after you install Windows, you have to install all of your device drivers before you can get things to work properly like the sound card or video card. Now imagine that you just got done re-installing Windows, and you go to install your ethernet card driver, only to have the installer crash and destroy your pristine Windows install. Does that sound like fun? I didn't think so. 
 
What if I told you that you wouldn't have to endure that suffering ever again? OK...here's the deal. 
 
Tonight I decided to download and install the beta for Internet Explorer 7.0. What I didn't want to do was to trash my current Windows XP Pro installation (running under Parallels Virtual Machine software on my Apple MacBook) by installing some beta software from Microsoft. I really wanted to try the software, however. 
 
I said to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if I could just clone my current Windows XP installation and install the beta IE software into it?" That way I could play with the new browser in the clone of my XP installation, but not trash my original. 
 
I started clicking on the menus at the top of the screen and lo and behold, there it was! Under the menu labled VM was a menu item called, "Clone VM". Next thing you know, I had cloned my XP Pro installation IN UNDER 9 MINUTES!!!. 
 
What is really cool is that I now get to choose which install I want to work with. If I want to test out a piece of software, I just install it in the "testing" installation of Windows. If I need to do serious work in Windows XP, I use the original installation. 
 
Just another one of the million reasons to buy a Macintosh.