I have become a big time virtual machine user (Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is my tool of choice), so as a result I am constantly starting up and shutting down various VM’s. I have found that a much faster way to both close and reopen a VM is to save the state and then resume from the saved state.

The ‘Save State’ function is essentially the same as the Windows hibernation function. Everything in memory is saved to the hard drive, so when you resume the contents are written back to memory and you are ready to go. Doing this is significantly faster than going through the start up and shutdown procedures and allows me to keep the applications I need on each VM open, so I am ready to go when the VM loads.