vmware method is great, the one where you "repair" the tiger vmware image to a secondary darwinx86 formatted partition/hd is what i used
at startup, there is a delay of 10 seconds to input boot parameters "hit any key"
use for top speed the following... "platform=x86pc" no quotes
then go tweak crazy
dualboot, become owner, graphical tweaks,
delete "/System/Library/Extensions/AppleTPMACPI.kext" (important) etc.
in a nutshell osX is much peppier than xp on my machine, even without hardware acceleration of video. yikes.