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The top group shows scores for my Mac Mini the bottom chart shows the two MacBook Airs.ДЄll of these scores are on a scale of 1-7.9. Here are the side-by-side WEI scores for all systems.

Click through to the next page for details. I was shocked at the differences in performance. In addition, I collected performance information from my colleagues Zach Whittaker and Christopher Dawson, both of whom have new MacBook Airs running Windows on the side. I have Windows running in Boot Camp and in multiple virtual machines. The latter two pieces of the puzzle are recent upgrades, with the disk being a substantial improvement over the original sluggish 5400 RPM drive. I looked at these numbers on my late-2009 Mac Mini, with a decent Core 2 Duo CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 7200RPM Seagate Momentus XT hybrid disk. You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating. To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe). What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware. It's at least $300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps. That's a bare minimum of $250 on top of the premium cost you pay for Apple's hardware. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item.

VirtualBox is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range.

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Virtualization software $0-80 I've been testing VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac.

You can find it discounted from legitimate resellers for roughly $250, so let's use that price. OEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, that shrink-wrapped product costs $300. (Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM.

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Windows 7 Professional $250 Under Windows license terms, the only option a normal consumer has for Windows 7 in a VM on a Mac is what's called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license.

And if your can't-live-without it Windows app is Microsoft Office or an accounting program or a point-of-sale system, well, you have to pay for that too. You can pay for virtualization software or find a free alternative, but Windows itself isn't free. There's the monetary cost of software, of course, but there are also some hidden performance costs. Before you try it, though, you should learn about the costs-some of them not so obvious at first glance.

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But after a recent memory and disk upgrade I've been looking at virtualization software for OS X, which allows me to run Windows without having to first shut down OS X. On the Mac, I originally installed Windows 7 on a Boot Camp partition. So if a virtual machine can handle both Windows and OS X apps gracefully, I would have a much easier time moving back and forth.

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I have a handful of Windows programs that don't have Mac alternatives, and I have both a Mac and a Windows PC on my desktop. That's actually a pretty compelling pitch for me. Apple pitches it as the way to run 'specialty software.' You know, 'that one Windows application. That's a big selling point for Apple, which gives this feature a marquee position on its 'Why You'll Love a Mac' page.

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