[Rob Channell]

Looks like a decision has been made but I just went through this in the last couple of days so here is what I found in case someone else is searching later.

I loaded VMWare and Parallels both on an iMac (i5) to try them out. I had a laptop already running windows XP so I migrated the entire laptop PC to run under virtual machines on the Mac using both Parallels and VMWare. Both products worked well but the VMWare was slightly faster on the benchmark I chose and it used 1/3 of the memory footprint of Parallels.

On the VMWare software I set it up so the virtual Windows machine had its own IP address and appeared to the other computers on our network as a separate computer. I could also share files between the Windows OS on the virtual machine and the Mac OS X. Both Parallels and VMWare are available on a trial basis. Download them for free and see if it will work for you. Buy it only if you like it. It can be a memory hog depending on how you set it up. If you migrate an existing computer it will take more disk space than the current disk in you computer. One of my computers had a 1TB disk and both Parallels and VMWare wanted 1.4TB of disk space to migrate the old system. You could also start from scratch with a fresh Windows install to use less space.

I intend to try a couple of external pieces of hardware next to see if I can get them to work..... a USB to quad serial port converter, a USB video capture device, and another small data logger device with Windows only software.

SuperPi benchmark of (4) threads, each computing Pi to 16 million digits

iMac running Windows XP under VMWare virtual machine limited to 4 processors and 4GB RAM
6 minutes 45 seconds

3.2 GHz Dual Xeon processor capable of 8 threads but limited to 4 for the benchmark
11 minutes 15 seconds