<p>Parallels are a no go for engineering software as it does exactly that, it parallels XP/Vista with OSX, meaning the CPU is split into half. For basic tasks thats fine, but for heavy modeling you won’t get the power you need.</p>
<p>Dual-booting is simple imho. My aunt has a iMac with Bootcamp and it takes her all of about 2 minutes to reboot into XP. All the files stay where they are iirc so if you know that you will be doing some modeling, boot up into xp and stay there for a while. </p>
<p>I am sure I will be running XP a good amount, but for the more basic stuff like text editing, photoshop, email/web I prefer the OSX layout and “niceness.” I just like how things work in a mac.</p>
<p>Plus for course VI, depending on how CS you go, Macs have eclipse and development environment compatibility so it really shouldn’t be an issue. To each his own of course!</p>