Are there disadvantages?

Hi,

Probably a question you all get a lot so sorry if this is going to irritate anyone.
However - are there any disadvantages apart from the use of space on the hard drive for dual booting in bootcamp with xp, vista, or windows 7?

This shouldn't slow down the iMac 27inch 3.1ghz should it?

Bootcamp separates Windows environment from Mac OS X environment, so to speak. They don't effect each other. Partitioning your Mac's HDD to allow for Windows via Bootcamp could potentially slow down your Mac OS X side IF you don't leave enough free space on the Mac side (15%-20% minimum). Other than that, no harm if you absolutely need Windows too, and plenty of us do at times.

It depends on how you do it. If you use bootcamp, absolutely no difference in speed, just the disk space, but you have to log out of either system to use the other.

You can also use something like VMware Fusion (what I use) which allows you to use Windows within OS X. It does cause some slower performance, but it's not really too noticeable unless you're doing something hardcore on your windows vm session.

The advantage however is that you don't need to log out of OS X in order to use Windows.