B.....o......c......h.......s
Bochs is too slow for what I need to use it for. Despite that, I'm hugely impressed by its capabilities. It's awesome.

I've managed to find a solution without having to resort to commercial software. It's called picking up one of the many old machines that I have lying around, figuring out what's inside it, and installing my new system onto that.

Today's find is a 1GHz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM, and 20Gb of disk drive space. Amazing what I have lying in the spare room.

Unfortunately, it appears that the reason this machine was lying in the spare room is that it's made from the parts of a machine that died a particulary gruesome death, with much smoke and heat. It's rebooting at random intervals, so it doesn't look particularly stable. Hopefully it's something simple like a heat problem (it's got the itty bittiest fan), and I can fix it just by whacking a larger heat-sink on it, or underclocking the whole rig.

Update
After installing Windows on a real machine, I'm not that sure that Bochs was that slow after all.