[mothered]

Although fluctuating, that's some Intense CPU activity you have going there.  Love the layout, no complaints whatsoever.

Then I remembered I have VMware, but I hate having to have the vm console window open and constantly switching between them.

I certainly agree with this. If there was better Interchangeability, It'll make life a lot easier. I have 6 VMs running simultaneously and don't enjoy the task of switching between screens.

Lots of stuff happening on this machine at any given time. Usually about a billion chrome tabs, directv, a couple virtual machines, and VS.

100+ tabs alone (also depending on the nature of the webpages opened at the time), can consume a considerable amount of memory. And that's aside from the memory killer of multiple VMs.

I'd easy have around 120+ tabs open and 6 VMs running on my system with 32GB of ram. In combination with other tasks, the available memory has come as low as 3GB at one point. Ram Is volatile, so no problem In getting It back.