If you have a new Intel Mac ( MacBook or iMac ) then you should really look at Parallels as soon as possible.

Parallels is a new Virtual PC product that uses the new Virtualisation technology built into the new Core Duo processors from Intel to deliver what must be the best PC within a PC experience so far seen on a Mac.

Using Parallels Mac users will be able to seamlessly run Linux, Windows, OS/2, DOS etc within OS X. Obviously to do this the Mac needs to have enough memory to cope with both operating systems at the same time, however the virtual OS can be “throttled” to force it to only use a certain amount of the host Mac memory. In my test setup a Windows 2000 SP 4 PC runs at a perfectly acceptable speed with only 128Mb of my Mac’s 1.5Gb.

This is an ideal product for a whole raft of users and purposes, obvious choices would be web designers who want to check out new designs in Internet Explorer under Windows without having to boot up a Windows PC, Mac switchers who wish to continue using some of their old Windows apps whilst they aclimatise to the world of OS X etc.

Starting a previously suspended Windows session is exceptionally quick, taking only a few seconds, which means popping in and out of a virtual session is a practical alternative to those who perhaps dont have an ideal amount of memory to leave sessions open permenantly.

The one area that this solution will not be suitable for is for playing Windows games, for this a dual boot solution using Apples Boot Camp is far more capable.