I'm about to make this leap of faith and put VMFusion on my iMac. I have purchased Vista and I have a couple of nagging questions.
1. Will Vista suck up my mac's resources to the degree that it will feel sluggish when the Vista window and MS programs are running?
Yes. Your virtual machine will share resources with Mac OS X while it is running. When you turn it off, the resources will be released. If you have adequate memory for both OSes to run at the same time, it shouldn't make it sluggish. For example, OS X runs well in 1GB and Vista runs acceptably in 1GB. So, if you have 2GB, it should be fine.
2. I have a Lacie 1TB disc with plenty of room on it, and its using my firewire 800 connection. Should Vista be installed on the Lacie, and if so, is that difficult to set up? I only ask this because of my worry about viruses. And of course... would this make it sluggish?
When you set up your VM, you'll create a virtual hard disk file. That file will grow as your storage demands increase. You can put the file anywhere you wish, but if you put it on an external, you may notice a degradation of performance. If you're going this for security purposes, your plan is misguided. The VM is completely sandboxed, so if you had a virus in a VM, it would be contained to the VM, unless you open up VMWare to allow the VM to see your Mac's drive/home folder, etc.
Frankly, I don't even run AV in my VMs. I just keep a backup copy of the hard disk file. If I were ever to become infected, recovery is as easy as shutting the VM down, deleting the existing hard disk file and replacing it with the backup. I'd be back up in seconds, malware free.
3. I still have my "old" Shuttle PC running XP Pro, and I was wondering if its possible to simply move over the OS and the 2 or 3 programs to the Lacie drive. I ask this because of the resource issue (XP over Vista), but I know that MS will not support XP sometime in the future.
VMware has a tool that can virtualize an existing PC. I haven't tried it, but as I understand it, this is exactly what it's designed to do.
As far as XP's longevity, keep in mind that Vista was not particularly well-received. XP still has the greatest marketshare, so it will be a very long time before support is dropped.
But as I understand this miracle (LOL), I will be able to open a XP/Vista window within the Mac desktop, and then run my Corel programs. Lets say I create some graphics and then export that graphic as a TIFF file which could then be used in my mac's photoshop? And yes... I hope to wean myself off of these windows programs and learn illustrator and a few others. I have already dumped MS Office for iWork '09 and I'm getting by just fine.
Yes and yes.