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All of these scores are on a scale of 1-7.9. The color coding is simple, bright green is the best, dark red is the worst, with yellow in the middle.

Thats a big selling point for Apple, which gives this feature a marquee position on its Why Youll Love a Mac page.

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.

On the Mac, I originally installed Windows 7 on a Boot Camp partition.

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But after a recent memory and disk upgrade Ive been looking at virtualization software for OS X, which allows me to run Windows without having to first shut down OS X.

Before you try it, though, you should learn about the costs--some of them not so obvious at first glance.

Theres the monetary cost of software, of course, but there are also some hidden performance costs.

The cost of software You can pay for virtualization software or find a free alternative, but Windows itself isnt free.

And if your cant-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.

Lets run the tape: 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 whats called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license.

Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM.

OEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, that shrink-wrapped product costs 300.

You can find it discounted from legitimate resellers for roughly 250, so lets use that price.

Virtualization software 0-80 Ive been testing VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac.

Ive been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-60 range.

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.

Its at least 300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps.

The hidden performance costs What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware.

To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe).

You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating.

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.

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 have Windows running in Boot Camp and in multiple virtual machines.

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.

Page 2: Performance hits, misses -- Here are the side-by-side WEI scores for all systems.

All of these scores are on a scale of 1-7.9.

The color coding is simple, bright green is the best, dark red is the worst, with yellow in the middle.

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