so I’m 100% mac @ home due to hubby’s career- but would have more and more use for PC so that I could VPN and do work related stuff (mac excel sux)… does anyone have experience here? Asking bc I’m seriously considering upgrading my iMac to the new 27" beauty. I hate working from home bc I’m too spoiled w/ mult monitors in the office- but with the 27’ screen you’ve basically got 2 and it can serve as the guest room TV. Is parallels pretty seamless or just an annoying hack?
Just use bootcamp. That’s what I use. You can switch between mac/pc.
You know what I noticed. akanska never participates in the Friday thread. Why is that?
Scroll lock key 
I have Parallels and run it on a MBP and it works pretty well. There are three issues with it that may or may not be issues for you. The first two are that you should make sure you have lots of real physical RAM and HD space for your virtual machine to use. The third that if you are going to use mac and windows simultaneously, you’ll need to make sure you have screen space to do it, because I find it inconvenient to switch from mac to windows screens all the time. These don’t sound like major issues for you. For one, you said you are getting the enormous screen, so you should have space. There are two ways to work around the screen issue: one is to use Parallels’ “coherence” mode, which basically gives you your mac desktop and dock, but windows programs that are running just show up as windows-style windows. The other is to run Parallel’s in “full screen” mode, but allocate one of Leopard’s virtual desktops (called “spaces”) to it. I do the latter, but on a big screen, the former is very plausible. If you are going to be using windows-only but just on mac hardware (ie when you use windows, you aren’t going to be playing with any mac stuff at the same time), then the RAM is not such a big issue. You will need disk space to store your windows virtual hard disk, but disk space is relatively cheap these days. You could also do boot camp to do the full windows thing, which is free compared to Parallels, though you’d have to reboot every time you switch from mac to windows. Parallels runs at about 95% the speed of bootcamp according to the reviews I’ve seen. Basically the 5% speed loss is for the rest of the Mac OS system that has to be running in the background under Parallels which is not necessary under bootcamp. So it sounds like a good deal for you. I envy you your nice big iMac.
Parellels or VMWare is what I use. If not bootcamp like mentioned before.
If you get bootcamp, do you need to buy a windows O/S?
Yes