I spent the entire afternoon installing Windows XP Pro in Parallels as a Virtual Machine. Installing Windows on any PC takes a good bit of time, but as a VM, it seemed a little quicker, by a few minutes. As long as I only have Parallels running on the OS X side, and put XP in full screen mode, it’s pretty much like having a Windows lappy. I installed the free developer tools so I can do .Net programming and I installed an old version of Office 2000 that I purchased a million years ago when I was a loyal Windows user.
I mostly use the Windows VM for when I need to check if my web sites work with IE7 or to play with Visual Studio. Both situations are rare. I need to get ClamWin installed on it, so I don’t get every virus around. But really, the thing is only on for short amounts of time and I don’t surf or do email on it.
I do like how Parallels lets you access your home folder on the OS X side from the Windows XP VM. That’s way cool.