Have you guys ever heard of Vagrant? It's a portable environment for virt. machines. I just discovered it, and it's perfect as a development environment.
It is a framework for using VirtualBox, Parallels, HyperV, VMware etc in a way that is portable and very fast to setup and share a complete dev environment. There are many different flavors of pre-built VMs you cand download and get going right away.
I use this one for Joomla!
https://github.com/joomlatools/joomla-vagrant The one thing I never tried before was setting up a headless VM, which requires far less memory, so even a 4GB machine is pretty snappy. I don't know how well it will work for a Windows dev box, since I don't think it's possible to run one headless, but conceptually it would work and you could connect using RDP. Just don't know how much RAM saving you could have or how you could have a rich GUI through RDP without all the overhead. On Linux upi don't have to include X Windows.
As I said I never looked into headless VMs before, so it may actually be quite doable even with a Windoze box.
I've been out of the hard core dev scene so long now, but I sure hope the I3 devs know about Vagrant or something like it, b/c it truly is the best way to get a fully functional baseline / standardized dev environment up & running.