After I handed my work laptop back a few weeks ago I bought a mac for home for general day to day computing. Generally I'm happy with how its going except there are a few niggling issues such as my online bank needs IE and things like my Webcam and GPS won't work.

I was planning on buying Office 2007 for the Mac but given the issues above I'm wondering if it would be better to get Parallels or Fusion and a copy of Windows 7 and use the Windows version of Office I already have…

I've seen some mixed reviews though and the software + windows isn't exactly cheap so perhaps the better plan is to overcome my problems 1 by 1. i.e. New webcam, can probably find a Mac GPS driver, etc.

Thoughts and experiences welcome….

Cheers, Dave

Edit: Sorry wrong forum

use Sun virtual box first – its free see how you get on with that.

you will still need a windows disk or .iso though.

I've got parallels installed, but, tbh, never use it. I just use bootcamp the odd time I need to use Windows on this machine. As carbon337 says, as long as you've got a copy of Windows to install you should be ok.
What're your webcam and gps though- I'm surprised drivers don't exist for them.

Which bank needs IE? Bit worrying…

2001 wants its website back…

I use VMware fusion in my Mac, mainly for Anquet/Memory Map.

It does work pretty well and if you run it in 'fusion mode' you can run stuff like MS office on the virtual machine and it just fires up as and when it's needed (ie when you open and office document in OSX). The windoze windows just appear as if they were running natively on OSX.

It does cause some problems though, such as sleeping (the virtual machine sometime stops the mac from sleeping), and I'd recommend at least 4GB of RAM for it to all run smoothly.

VMware Fusion here with Windows XP on a bootcamp partition which works well.

I got parallels when it first came out, and it sucked. Lot's of features, but also lot's of bugs. When the Fusion beta came out I jumped on it right away and used it up to v3 (bought v2, tried 3 for the 1 month trial). I just got a deal on the new parallels and switched back. It's noticable faster, and no stability during the 10 hours I've used it.

I installed bootcamp, but never got myself to boot to it. I guess if you want max performance for game that's the right route, but I only reboot for updates…