Tidbit about Apple Time Machine

If you have a large enough backup harddrive Time Machine looks like it should be a great ease of use solution, but I'll investigate other backup solutions for more flexibility of backup of specific files/folders.
link

running Windows on Mac hardware

Here is an excellent review of three different solutions for running Windows on Mac hardware at MacTech.
They don't mention an opensource virtualization solution by Sun Microsystems, VirtualBox. I have tried version 1.4.1-beta2 and it works ok but lacked USB support. They are now at version 2.0.4 and USB support is supposed to be working, so I need to try it.