[whs]

I am glad you guys find the article useful. As they used to say. "Try it, you'll like it".

@ Doug 72, Yes it is similar to VMWare which costs $89 - but those 2 programs are freeware. And since my finance minister did not feel like allocating $89 for it (she is tough), I had to go with this, which turned out to work very well - especially Virtual Box.

Just one more general comment: Do not dispair when you switch to the host system (after starting W7 in the virtual partition) to find that the host is very sluggish. That will be only for a little while until Superfetch has rearranged the real estate. Once you have been running a bit, things will come to order.
And a second little tip (to avoid a stupid little problem): Enlarge the window of the virtual partition (if you have the space on your screen) so that there is a "white frame" around the W7 window. Before I did that, I always hit the wrong red X in the top right corner - rather than ending what was running in the virtual partition, I killed the whole virtual partition. With the white frame, that is less likely to happen.