Fusion vs. Parallel vs. Boot Camp for Windows 7. Probably a dumb question.

Question

OK, here is my question. I want to install Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro. The primary reason is to run Excel 2007 for work. Not intensive games or anything like that. Excel for Mac does not always transfer well to Excel users at the office, and I spend double time reformatting, etc. Anyway, I wanted to know do you have to use bootcamp along with Fusion or Parallels Desktop 5 or can I use one of these independently? It looks like on Parallels website that it is independent. Of course bootcamp is free, but I really am tired of waiting for these drivers (Something we all agree on.) If I use Fusion or Parallels, which do you recommend? Again, all I am really doing is running office documents.
Here are my system specs:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,5
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP55.00AC.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.47f2
Serial Number (system): WQ937*66D
Hardware UUID: 84DA3741-0B85-5107-8281-CE2E623D4A6E
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled
Thanks again for any comments!!
<Edited by Host>
Clay Wagner

Answer 1

You could handle it in almost any variation you want. With only 2GB of RAM though, the virtual machine will not be very snappy. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably just do boot camp, since it's going to be just as quick to boot with the option key and select windows to do excel stuff, then reboot back to mac when you're done, since it'd be free and give you the best performance.
If you're not too worried about it running slow (1GB for the virtual machine would be pushing my patience to the limits and i wouldn't run it with any less, nor would I take any MORE away from OS X) then you could go with just a virtual machine, no need to boot camp it at all if you didn't want to, just do a normal virtual machine build from within whichever app you chose. So if that speed issue isn't a problem, just to do MS Excel sometimes in a windows environment, I'd just do the virtual machine only, save having to partition the drive at all with boot camp and such.
Now, there's a lot of back and forth on the current versions of parallels and fusion. I spent a week or so with both when each new version was released testing, because I do have a boot camp windows 7 partition and sometimes do it virtually rather than booting into it (but I have 4GB of RAM so it's a little more usable for me). I found that my experiences paralleled a lot of the people out there. Parallels had a bit better graphics response, but fusion for me boots it quicker, and i have no problems at all running anything I want with it. Parallels I had some performance issues outside of the video subsystem that just frustrated me too much. Both have their flavor of a "coherence" or whatever they call it mode, where you could actually not even have the virtual machine "visible", you'd just see your Excel application running on your dock like any native OS X app does. And they both did a good job of that for me (that's actually how I run my Outlook since I really can't stand Entourage).
So any answer will be a "valid" answer, but you're really the only one who can say whats going to be the "right" one for you.
Hope this helps a bit.
John