I need to use Windows and MS Office (the Windows version) for various jobs I do. This, unfortunately, is non-negotiable.
The solution I've been using is Virtual PC + Win2K and Office 2K. This hodgepodge isn't without its quirks. First off, Virtual PC on an iBook is just the other side of responsive. Mostly, it's just painfully slow. (The PC I used to use at the office was an old ~200MHz Pentium II running NT; Virtual PC feels noticeably and annoyingly slower.)
Virtual PC has a nice feature that it can put a system image to sleep, so you can continue where you left off last time. Recently, I've come to notice that if I leave an Explorer window open (the file browser, that is), trying to refresh the window displaying files on the HFS+ filesystem (not the native FAT32 filesystem managed by Virtual PC), I can get Windows Explorer to crash within about 15 seconds. (It takes that long to catch up and stop the idiotic flashlight animation.) All in all, this is probably just Windows being Windows on an alien configuration.
The other really frustrating nit with Virtual PC is that it will crash Mac OS X hard when the iBook goes to sleep and Virtual PC is running. Of the last five reboots of my iBook in the last 30 days, four have been from failure to sleep or wake up from sleep while running Virtual PC. The fifth was from Software Update upgrading some security bits.
Sigh.
