said by slajoh01:whats a really good lightweight free VM solution for running this on a Windows 7 machine which does not suck or drain my CPU usage or keep it down to a minimum?
Both VMware Player, and Virtualbox will do the trick. I would configure it with an ISO image optical drive, no HD, and about 512MB ram. That should be plenty. If you want it to be more secure, link to the real optical drive, and use the actual CD, but your performance will be much better with an ISO image.