So you want to run Window's on your Mac

Since Apple switched over to Intel processors, running Windows on a Mac has gotten easier and better. There are two basic ways to run Windows on your Mac, in a virtual setting or natively. More specifically, you can run Windows inside an envoironment like VMWare Fusion or Parallels, or you can boot your computer directly into the Windows OS using Boot Camp.

BootCamp is a utility that comes with the Apple operating system, and will section off a portion of your hard drive to install the Windows operating system. If you run a computing lab, this is great because you only have to have one piece of computing machinery to run either operating system. There is a free application called Boot Picker  that will present you with an OS choice when the computer boots up. When the user logs off the workstation, they simply reboot the station and it presents the OS choice once again. Note however, that when running a boot camp environment, you will run either Mac OS X, or Windows.

Virtualization will give you the best of both worlds. If you are a moderate user of Windows applications, such as using Office or web application, you should find the experience to be seemless. If you use advanced applications that require significant computing resources, such as CAD, video editing, etc., then you might want to use Windows in the Boot Camp environment for these applications. 

If you think that  you might need to switch between running Windows in a vitual environment and a BootCamp environment, you might try this. Install Windows under a BootCamp environment, and when you install your VM product (Fusion or Parallels), you can use that same partition of Windows for your VM. Both VM products will recognize your BootCamp partition as an installation of Windows, and allow you to run that in a virtual environment. When you make system changes or updates to your VM, they will be present when you run Windows in BootCamp. It's the same environment run both ways!

There are bascially two products for virtualization on the Mac OS, and they are Parallels and VMWare Fusion. If you are buying for your department, you might try looking for educational pricing through the AcademicSuperstore.com or other vendor. Some of these products are offered in multi-packs as well, which offers a slight discount on the academic price. 

There is a lot more on this topic that I'm not covering, and I just wanted to breach the subject. If you have any more questions or thoughs on this I would be happy to address those.  

Ciao

Jason