[tr1290]

I am considering an MBP because they are made out of Al and I have had two separate laptops in for broken hinges/cracked cases in the last year, but some of the software required for my major will not run on Mac OS X, so I plan to use either Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion.

1.) Which is the better software? (Easier to use? Faster? Uses less system resources? More reliable?)
2.) What are the pros and cons, if any, to virtualization over using Boot Camp (I know that not needing to reboot to switch OS is one pro.)
3.) Can either of them run Visio 2007 or Visual Basic 2008?

[Headrush]

Both should suit your purposes fine and run both those programs without problems.

You will get fans of both but they are both decent programs. Having said that I've always used Vmware Fusion and been extremely happy with it. (Version 3 is out soon, so might be worth waiting a bit.)

The hassle of not needing to reboot the machine is like you said the main benefit.
Both virtualization and Bootcamp and share info with the Mac filesystem and for applications like you listed speed won't be dramatically different.

If you you ran applications that needed direct hardware access or you wanted the fastest 3D performance possible would be the main reason to use Bootcamp over virtualization.

Both Parallels and Fusion do a great job of integrating Windows programs into the OS X desktop and hiding away the Windows desktop. (So Windows apps almost appear like they are native OS X apps.)

I think both companies have videos on their web sites showing their features.

[jfm429]

I use Parallels, which so far has been great. Like Headrush said, either is going to do you just fine.

For the record, I have Windows 7 Pro running on Parallels 4, and it can run Visual Studio 2008 Pro just fine. Visio 2007 should be no problem at all. It really runs pretty fast, and I haven't noticed any performance issues.

[Headrush]

FYI, Fusion 3 was just realeased this week.

So far in my testing 3D performance has improved significantly. (Using only 1 core of my dual on iMac)