Getting rid of another desktop
A while ago I bought myself a MacBook. I use it as both my primary computer at home, and at work. It sucks to have to buy a computer with my own money for work - but it was either that or continue to use an outdated PC and WinXP.
Over time, it has gotten to a point where I pretty much only use the PC to check my outlook and make sure that documents I have created on my Mac look okay in Office. Not exactly computational heavy lifting.
The other day I had the bright idea to try and get a corporate image of WinXP working in VM Ware. It was amazing how easy that turned out to be. The process was amazing simple. Use VMWare to create a new virtual machine, pop in my depoyment CD, type in my corporate username and password, and let the installer run.
Once installed, everything worked like a champ. I use the Unity option in VMWare so that I can just interact with my windows apps like they were any other app running on my laptop. Performance is surprising usable — just a tad slower than Windows running on my bottom of the line PC at work.
Overall, a very pleasant experience. For anyone holding out on using a Mac because they need to run one or two applications, this is a great solution.