Leopard offering virtualization?

Leopard won't offer virtualisation however it will come with Bootcamp to allow you to boot into Windows XP/Vista.

Personally I would go for VMware however there may be a slight draw on resources depending on what the spec of your machine is.

If you already have a Windows machine you can use VMware's free convertor tool which turns it into a virtual machine ... marvellous (and incredibly easy!).

HTH

- D

 

As dwright mentioned, no, Leopard will not include virtualization (just dualbooting).

You can download trial versions of both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac and see which one you prefer. Online opinion seems split pretty evenly between the two. Personally, I use Parallels because I initially needed it to do testing with a firewall package (pfsense) and VMware wasn't flexible enough for setting up several network interfaces. That's not really a normal use case so I don't know that I'd endorse one over the other just on that basis.

As long as you've got enough RAM to comfortably fit two running operating systems at the same time (A machine with only 1GB will be painful) I think you'll be pretty happy with the performance. Just don't expect to run any games other than Minesweeper and Solitaire.

Download them both and play around -- that's the best way to get a feel for how they work for your needs.