I'm far from an expert in anything having to do with computing, but I'd like to add something to what Macster said. Even a 2-gig iMac G-5 slows down appreciably when you run Virtual PC on top of OSX.
My experience is that a real-time, graphics-intensive data feed of financial markets information ran so slowly on Virtual PC due to processing latency that the prices displayed weren't real-time prices. The screen image resolved out of synch and in a very jerky-appearing way. This might be similar to how games would run in the environment.
More experience: Mathmatica (and its various add-ons) is a computational software. I owned a licensed Windows version of release 5.2. This ran less than half the speed on Virtual PC than it ran on my previous Windows PC. Some calculations involving principal component analysis and Monte Carlo sims were taking hours longer to run. I bit the bullet and bought the Mac OSX versions of the Mathematica packages I and found they run faster in the OSX environment than the Windows packages do on either Win 2K or XP Pro.
Most people making the switch from Windows to Apple's platform won't face these issues. Switching from the complex Microsoft computing environment to the straight-forward Apple computing environment lets me do more of what I actually want to do with a computer, rather than learn an entirely new profession in order to tend to the Microsoft operating system's incessant demands. Also, it's simply better-looking and more fun.
Last edited by AcroChik; 1st November 2006 at 11:21.
Reason: Infelicitous flights of grammar.