Chris Wagner wrote:

Is it a Windows emulator, and if so, does it work fairly well?

What kind of hit does it put on system resources?

   Three flavors:
    1. Wine, the GPL'd core. This one is the least supportive but it
       still runs an amazing quantity of apps from the Win95/Win98 era.
       Slow but steady progress is being made.
    2. Wine, with Crossover extentions. The extentions have a heavy
       emphasis on 2D emulation perfection and can therefore run things
       like Office, Internet Exploder and the like. This one costs money.
       I haven't tried it. "Crossover Office"
    3. WineX, with Transgaming extentions. The extentions to the GPL'd
       core have a heavy emphasis on 3D emulation (reverse engineering
       DirectX). I have this one and use it to play Warcraft 3. This also
       costs money -- though, it can be pulled from CVS and built for
       free if you're knowedgable enough to do that.

   The overhead for emmulation will vary by the task. Computation types
   of things get very little performance hit while calls to
   Win32-specific libraries and functions generate quite a bit of
   overhead. I would say that you need twice that of the minimum system
   requirements for an application on a non-emmulated Windows system.