The .zip format has an upper limit of 2GB per file.  You can create spanning .zip files for larger jobs, but a tool like RAR is better suited for humungoid directories.

I'll ask.  When I questioned him originally about his choice, he cited the fact that he's primarily a SQL Server developer and liked how stable his environment became after switching from XP.  I don't think he's the sort that runs a bazillion tray applications either (like many of the folks around here).

Jeff Atwood has valid points, and I treasure his Coding Horrors site.

However, until VM support is integral to the operating system, running by default... I don't see that as a valid strategy for typical users.  One of the reasons I keep VMWare so busy is trying out new stuff I download, just in case it turns unexpectedly evil. That's not practical on my laptop, with its weenie 80GB drive and pokey processor.

If you're a road warrior, and go around plugging your latop into foreign networks all the time, then it makes sense to run the standard stuff (firewall, defender, virus scanner).

I keep Nod32 running on my primary workstation for peace of mind.  Its threat detector has triggered maybe a dozen times in three years, and most of the time it's a false positive or something embedded in a spam I had no intention of opening anyway.  But that 7% performance hit is well worth the alternative: always wondering.