Mac X... XP

I had strengthened my Macintosh recently. After migrating part of songs from old PC to Mac and installing the printer, now I am trying to run Windows inside the Mac. Of course, I do not want to leave the Mac OS X environment nor partition-ing the harddisk into two. So, the only solution is to run a virtual PC inside Mac OS. Since my iMac is Intel-based (Core 2 Duo), it is just perfect to run without a big overhead or much performance trade-off.

Third party application is needed to install a virtual PC. There is no free lunch (Boot Camp? No way). Besides the outdated Virtual PC by Microsoft (they haven't support the Intel-Mac yet, AFAIK), other choices would be Parallels and Q(emu). I've installed both applications. On Parallels, I created a 8GB harddisk with 256 MB ram. I installed a full version Windows XP Pro (no SP) on it. On Q(emu), I created a 4GB harddisk with 256 MB ram. For this one, I tried the mini-XP ISO version. Install using ISO file is a lot faster than using the CD (and less noisy). Since the two installations are too much different, I cannot compare them yet. So far, base on my observation on the Windows, I found that Parallels are stronger than Q(emu). Of course, they also differ in the price - Parallels costs HK$630 while Q costs nothing.