Yes, I agree with @Martin, VMWare is great for this VMWare. Not only for Delphi and its settings and component, but the whole O/S, including SPs, KBs, drivers, settings, applications & their settings, Anti virus, Firewalls.
This is what I do with VMWare ver 5 (other/newwer version might be different)
- Install VMWare on the Host O/S. The host can be a Windows O/S or a Linux O/S variant. I personally like to use Linux as the host O/S, because, for me, the security is better towards virus, malware etc.
- Install a guest O/S. This can be any supported O/S of choice, including any SPs, drivers needed.
- Install Delphi and all components you need.
- You can backup the guest O/S to a media, DVD-R, for example. If anything major happened, you can just restore it for less than 30 minutes. This is a huge benefit.
You can have as many as guest O/Ses you want (If you have the space). This is great for testing purposes. How many times you hear that your app is breaking on a particular O/S, with a specific SPs/KBs, dll or other specific settings on client PCs? With multiple guest O/Ses, you can test your app with different O/S and/or settings without having to have multiple PCs or multiple partitions with different O/Ses.
Of course VMWare has many other usages, but for me, the above usage scenario is enough.
Other Virtual Machine is from Oracle (Oracle VM) which is free Oracle VM. They claimed to be better than VMWare, but I myself have not tested it.
