[afreemanmd]

I am taking receipt of a new Mac Pro in two days time. I would like to have windows for occasional use. Compatability with Parallels would be a plus, though I do not think that I will use it initially.
I was considering a OEM verion of Vista Ultimate, as I understand that Parallels will only work with this or the business version.

Does anyone have any experience with using OEM Vista with Paralells? How does the "limited to a single machine" impact the use of Vista as a virtual machine with Parallels?

Is there really any problem with linkage to a single machine if one is using Vista as a Bootcamp or Parallels virtual OS? I can't imagine I would ever need to reinstall Vista on another Mac because by the time I buy my next Mac, in maybe 4 or 5 years, I would just buy a new copy of Windows OS, or its progeny, if it was even necessary in the future.

Finally I would appreciate any suggestions as to what the best solultion for my need is.
Many thanks!

[TheMosco]

I had Vista Business on my macbook and ended up uninstalling it and going back to Windows XP. In parallels, you don't get to take advantage of any of the aero affects of vista and I just found all the extra vista stuff to peg my battery more than running XP did.

However, this isn't that big a deal for you, because its the mac tower.

In reference to the single use, if you install vista on your bootcamp drive, you need to activate it in parallels for it not to complain about activation. You can't activate in bootcamp first. I can see two options if don't see yourseld using parallels too much at first.

1. Install it anyway, activate windows in it, and just use bootcamp.

2. Hack vista to extend activation to 120 days+ until you might be ready to use parallels.

[mduell]

XP Home, or XP Pro if you need the few additional features it has.

$100 ($140 Pro) at Newegg.