When a virtual machine solution is mentioned, most of use probably think of the celebrated VMware Workstation (which always stays ahead of the VirtualBox from Germany on performance and compatibility). Compared with VMware Workstation Pro, VMware Workstation Player (AKA: Player Pro, VMware Player for short) is more lightweight in both file size and function (can be seen as the simplified edition of VMware Workstation Pro), runs faster, and is free and more suitable for personal, home or non-commercial use.

If you would not like to install a full Android OS on your hard disk or USB flash drive using the Remix OS for PC, just want to run some Android apps or games through an Android OS emulator running on Windows, then Remix OS Player is a better choice. Compared with many other similar Android emulators, you will find it's much better, and it runs much faster and more smoothly.

QEMU (short for Quick Emulator) is a free and open-source processor emulator widely used on GNU/Linux platform, written by Fabrice Bellard from France. It primarily converts the binary code written for a specific processor to another through a special 'recompiler', so as to realize the OS virtualization.

Parallels Desktop for Mac is an extremely excellent virtual machine software running on Mac OS - proven, trusted and widely praised. It allows users to easily, seamlessly run Windows, Linux and other operating systems or applications at the same time under Mac OS X, saving the users' trouble of repeatedly rebooting the computer in order to switch between different OS.

For beginners using Windows who are interested in the C/C++ language (anyway, you need to compile your C/C++ programs) or Linux embedded system development, the big headache is switching back and forth between Windows & Linux. Even you have to continuously reboot system in order to achieve the purpose, very troublesome. Cygwin just solved this problem.