Long time reader, first time poster here. I checked out most of the virtualisation tools for Macs a couple of months ago and VMWare Fusion came out on top in terms of performance and CPU and memory usage, so I recommend that. To keep a Windows client under control use TinyXP, which is a stripped down version of Windows XP which is perfect for running IE (and Firefox and Opera - they sometimes do slightly different things under Windows).

I use Bootcamp on my Macbook. Works well.

I heard VMWare was good, too.

If you can, get 2gb worth of RAM in that MacBook Pro. The audio programs don't need it so much, but Parallels will.

newberry wrote:I use Bootcamp on my Macbook. Works well.

That's a great program if you want to boot into Windows. However, the drawback is if you're doing something where you need to have both OS's going, it's not going to work. Web design would require such a thing. Parallels/VMWare are great, because you can check your work in Windows IE versions without having to reboot your computer, have a whole different set of text editors, etc... Not only that, but it's very helpful to be able to run all browsers at the same time to adjust your code to.

we use parallels at work- 30 or so macs running XP sp2

works very well. there was, however, one recent update to parallels that sucked a tortoise cock and made everything unusably sluggggggish (and all the computers have 2GB ram +) but that was rectified pretty quickly by the people at parallels.

good product. i would pay for it if it wasn't already free from my work

good stuff. don't use it for anything but running ks and small things like that. so much better than virtual pc. have always been leery of using bootcamp, as one of its earlier versions somehow managed to end up erasing a good friend's external drives...