Running TC/MC on multiple boxes, so I voted for the laptop that is my daily user which I use Xorg inside VirtualBox with the additions installed.  I only give the VM 256MB ram and typically use only 75-100MB.  Another laptop runs TC on bare metal with Xvesa on 256MB and an old desktop runs MC on 160MB.  The desktop has Xvesa available, but I boot it into text mode usually.