VMWare Fusion

Wow.  This program is cool.  I need Windows for one very important thing (my Sansa Connect MP3 player), and thus far have tried every MTP solution out there for Mac to no avail.  I realized tonight that I could avoid chucking the player or repartitioning and dual booting by creating a virtual machine with XP.  For those less geekier than I, virtualization involves running another operating system within your native one (Mac OS X Leopard, for me).  VMWare Fusion creates a false hard drive for Window XP  (or Vista, or any Linux distro, etc) to install to.  For me, I kept it small as I only needed it for Windows Media Player to connect to my MP3 player.  And having access to Internet Explorer for school and work will be nice too.

The cool thing about Fusion?  Not only is it fast (just as fast as any native program; I'm assuming that's because I have a dual-core processor to split tasks), but it fully integrates with my Leopard desktop.  This means that Windows windows float with my Mac windows on my desktop seamlessly (except for their borders, of course).  And get this: Leopard somehow knows (I'm assuming that some part of Fusion tells it) that my MP3 player will only work with Windows, and therefore automatically passes it through when connected, as long as XP is running too.  Any of my other USB devices I have to explicitly tell to connect to XP if I need them (which I don't).  I'm pretty damn impressed.

Theoretically, I can run games through it too since it has DirectX 9 support, but I don't really feel the need to.  I'll probably give it a go at some point though; I need a FPS fix soon.  lol