If you just bought your first Mac and you cannot stand booting into Boot Camp to use XP or Vista, try VMWare Fusion. It lists at $80 (but can be found for cheaper at Amazon.com for now) and can run your Windows while you are running OS X. It is fast, simple, and seamless.
You need to go to www.vmware.com, go to the Products Tab, then Products Index, then scroll down to VMWare Fusion, download and install it, and then follow the steps to install your paid copy of XP or Vista within the player. Fusion is a virtual machine that tricks Windows into thinking it is on its computer system.
Why do you need it? It allows you slowly release Windows grip from your psyche. You can reinstall all of your Win apps on it and use them for a bit...or forever...and buy Mac versions someday. It is more secure because it "sand boxes" Windows and disables viruses or malware to jump from the virtual machine to the OS X.
Among other settings, you get to set how much hard drive space you want it to have, how much RAM it will allocate for Windows, and also if you want to share the OS X hard drive. I recommend a full 20 gigs for your Windows install within VMWare. For the RAM it depends on how much RAM you have on your Mac. For 2 gigs of RAM on your Mac then use 1 gig for VMWare and if you have 4 gigs of RAM on your Mac then use 2 gigs for VMWare. While VMWare is open and running, it will allocate the RAM entirely which gives you less to use for Mac applications. I recommend read-only setting for sharing with the OS X hard drive. You don't want this version of Windows writing to your Mac. If you enable read/write, then a virus or malware could potentially infect files outside of VMWare.
Hope this helps and makes sense. Comment or email if you need help.
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