You might want to check with those in the same engineering course as you on what are the software that they use to see if its suitable for running within a virtual machine or not. If its something rather heavy and resource hungry, then you might want to consider dual booting (bootcamp) instead, but if its something small to medium sized, then a VM should be alright.

I'll recommend vmware over parallels though.

Quite simple really. with the broadcast industry, Apple's products allows me to offer solutions (even customized ones) at a price that's extremely difficult to beat.

See if you can find a workflow & asset management system that's fully customizable and extensible for less than RM3649 (that's how much Final Cut Server). And when you're talking about the high end workstations and servers to handle such types of workload, the Mac Pro and the Xserve are actually very attractively priced, and at times cheaper than competitor products from like HP or IBM too.

The thing about Apple's pricing is well, for the lower range products, the price seems rather high, but for the higher range products, its actually cheaper. Another example where the price is rather difficult to beat will be in high performance storage solutions (Xsan)

CMD-K, then enter the IP address and share name of where I want to connect to, enter username + password, and done. No vomiting blood involved when I did it