Hello, I currently am using VMware Fusion on my MBP with windows xp pro and ubuntu 6.10. It is a great piece of software and am very glad I found it. It is very intuitive throughout and the latest release runs even faster than prior ones (make sure to disable debugging scripts in the prefs). I highly recommend it, but also bear in mind that 1) I have not tried Parallels and have no basis of comparison, and 2) you definitely going to want as much RAM as possible to make things smooth; I have 2 gig in mine. I alloted winXP 768mb of RAM so I can still have plently for OS X, but if you are only going to use the virtual machine for basic stuff like office or what not, you can get by with less (at least with XP, Vista might be a different story). I typically use the windows VM for menial tasks like copying files to an NTFS formatted drive and such, but I am trying to (unsucessfully) get games going on it; it has experimental directx 8.1 support, but none of the games I have tried with it run very well if at all (they have in the release notes for it a list of known working games however). The biggest perk though is that it is currently a free beta, but I have a feeling that might change come release time. I hope not though because I know they offer free VM software for windows/linux such as VMware Server which i also have used and enjoy. Anyway, it's a nice program so give it a shot!
