Testing out recommendations can lead to installing a ton of software, especially when asking more than one question here. That can slow down a running system, at least running on Windows. What are you recommend on how to test recommendations? Using a Virtual Machine?

Sometimes I need to know how 2 or more applications compare with regards to a specific feature / criterion: e.g. How does the speech recognition accuracy compare between Dragon NaturallySpeaking's and CMU Sphinx? How much faster is copying files though TeraCopy vs. Windows 7 native copy functi...