I'm to the point of needing a Windows machine at home to do a VPN connection to work for after hours support. I currently have a MacPro running 10.4.11 with plenty of RAM and disk space.

Any good talking points to recommend Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion?

I don't expect to have any heavy-duty Windows activity. Just a VPN connection to work and a VNC client to "run" my Windows 95 PC (on one of our legacy systems) at work.

If my wife's home PC gets any worse off than it is now, I may migrate her stuff to my Windows partition on my Mac.

Thanks for any opinions/recommendations.

I've recently read a very, verylong (about ten pages) head-to-head review of both Parallels and VMWare Fusion. In every category, the newest version of Parallels handily beat VMWare Fusion, from performance to graphics ability to number-crunching to memory usage to ease of setup.

However, if your needs are only to run Windows for VPN and other non-gaming tasks, and you don't need accelerated 3D graphics support, I would recommend you use neither of the above. For the kind of use you are talking about, there is no need to spend money. Sun's VirtualBox is free!

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

VirtualBox won't let you run accelerated 3D Windows games, but it will easily do what you're talking about.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply ... I'll check it out.

I've had very good luck using Remote Desktop Connection to connect to windows machines at work.