Would you run Photoshop in a VM? The screen looks a bit slow and laggy when using VMWare, which makes me feel like it’s a lot slower than running natively, but is this an illusion? Would it affect Photoshop?

It’s an illusion. It’s slightly slower but there’s virtually nothing in it.

Molly, think about it… You’ve got a layer between the (app and OS) and the hardware which wil take up some of the performance of the (app & OS), both in memory and CPU performance.

If you have an application that requires lots of both, which Photoshop will, then you would expect to see a drop in performance when your Dom0 host is taking up one CPU and half a gig of memory.

Will depend on what you use photoshop for. Photoshop does utilise your graphics card, and graphics support in vm software is generally shite.
For editing the odd photo it will be fine, wouldn’t want to use it for heavy day to day work though.

Out of interest is this anything to do with cs2 now being free ?

Depends on the specs of the VM really! On my work machine – yes. On my personal machine – no.

Molly, think about it… You’ve got a layer between the (app and OS) and the hardware which wil take up some of the performance of the (app & OS), both in memory and CPU performance.

Well, VMWare tools allows direct use of some hardware doesn’t it? Although Aero doesn’t work, so I guess it’s not that good.