Then the whole screen will turn dark, and a popup window will appear 'User Account Control - do you want to allow the following program to make changes to your software?' Underneath will be the name of the program and its publisher. The user runs without administative privileges all the time, until something happens that NEEDS administrative privilege. The actual account named 'Administrator' is created automatically, then is locked out automatically (unless you go to some trouble to change it). You will not need to create separate administrative and user accounts. You won't need a browser at all on the Windows 7 system for Microsoft Updates - Vista and 7 both have a separate utility for that purpose, named 'Windows Update.' Does anyone here have any tips for this Windows noob? If do I encounter any problems, they should be resolved when my free upgrade to Office 2010 arrives. But a quick Internet search has mostly revealed only minor problems experienced by users.

To a lesser extent, I'm also concerned about Office Professional 2007/Windows 7 compatibility. I also plan to create both administrator and non-administrator Windows accounts and mostly boot Windows under the non-administrator account to limit the damage Windows viruses can do to my Windows partition. Also, once I get my Windows software set up properly, I plan to make a disk image ( Source), which should allow me to do a quick reinstall if a virus manages to ravage my system. My lone exception to this rule will be using PC browsers to download Windows software updates, but only if a Windows browser is required. I realize that Windows viruses can only harm my Windows software, but I still plan to keep my exposure to a minimum by limiting my Web surfing to Mac browsers. I chose Norton Antivirus because I used to use it on my Macs back in the '90s, but I have no idea whether it's the best choice for PCs in 2010. My main concern at this point is viruses. (Google is my friend, and so is David Pogue's book Mac OS X Leopard, The Missing Manual.)

I'm also researching how to properly set things up.

While I'm waiting for my software to arrive, I'm optimizing my main hard drive and backup HD so that I can create BootCamp/Windows partitions on them both without erasing the data that currently resides on those drives. I finally decided to take the plunge and I ordered Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, MS Office Professional 2007 (with free upgrade to v2010 Windows), Norton Antivirus 2010 Windows, and Parallels Desktop 5 Mac. Is anyone here using both Mac OS X and Windows on their Intel Macs?

Bootcamp or parallels