Nice article. Hopefully others will read it and see how useful parallels can be. I am also a .NET developer and run most of the tools you do. Thankfully I use C# and not VB and I run into no problems with VS2005. I also use the compact framework and all the mobile device emulators within Parallels. It runs them snappier than when I used to develop on my 2.8ghz P4. I'm only using a MacBook(compared to a MBP) but other than the graphics they're pretty much identical. About the ram usage- I have 2gb ram, split down the middle. Parallels gets 1gb and I put the 924 or whatever Parallels suggested for XP. I'm generally running Photoshop and Illustrator(Rosetta), Adium, Colloquy, iTunes and Firefox in OS X and SQL Server & Enterprise Manager, Outlook 2007 Beta, IE and VS 2005 in Parallels. I don't really have any speed/memory issues on either side. Perhaps the MS Office in Rosetta was causing your slowness in OS X(Office was always slow..even on my G4 1.5ghz PowerBook).