I use a set of Unix utils similar to the one mentioned in the post, just to do spiffy things in a CMD shell once in a while. Other people have already mentione

I use a set of Unix utils similar to the one mentioned in the post, just to do spiffy things in a CMD shell once in a while. Other people have already mentioned that this is a much more lightweight kind of process than firing up a whole operating system in a VM. But more significantly, these utils are a bunch of .EXEs I can toss into a directory, possibly adding it to my PATH. Working (sometimes) on a "work" PC with no admin privileges, I think I can't install something like VMWare. I'd also worry about ending up with a big chunk of my memory chewed up as long as VMWare is running.