AMD strictly moderated (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"Is she going to run Win64 on it?"

No she isn't. Her application wouldn't benefit. And she isn't a geek who would enjoy the geekness. GAs have strong locality, except for when they don't. It is mainly a pointer chasing type of application. Pre-fetching doesn't help much, because the application tends to have strong locality and when it doesn't things tend to be random.

VMware should work just fine with GRUB. GRUB is just a bootloader. Since both Windows and Linux expect a minimal setup before they take control, GRUB doesn't do a whole lot. It should be able to pass control to VMware with little problem. Now I hve never done this, but I do know someone who has. He didn't have a problem. I can't promise this, but I suspect it shouldn't be difficult.