Can I use Mail+iCal to replace Outlook?

For one thing, Mac users that use Mail+iCal... I've seen them handle tens of thousands of email in Mail and hundreds of iCal events. I would consider myself using my Mac for work/productivity 30 hours per week. I wouldn't even want to consider Outlook (Last version I used was Outlook 2003).

If you have specifically very Microsoft Exchange Server - related things for work (like scheduling meetings and all that stuff and replying if you're going to meetings and other fiddly thingys) then consider Office 2008 (Entourage) (really).

What sort of tasks are you planning to do? First you need to see if your VPN is Mac compatible... For SMB, IMAP, etc.

If we're talking mostly organising your events in a calendar then sure iCal is great, iCal has the "autodetect" from words in an email (like "hope to see you Fri 24th April for the meeting"), you right click on it and create a new iCal event. iCal time zone support is pretty good as well. iCal is quite elegant and intuitive, seems quite basic but it grows on you.

And for mail if we're talking straight up IMAP and so on, then you'd be pretty surprised how powerful ~ well, just no nonsense ~ Apple Mail is. Once you organise your groups using Address Book then managing group email lists is pretty easy.

Spline I always thought you're a Mac user already? You have one at home I take it?

Do you use something like LDAP a lot to look up your company contacts? That part and the Microsoft Exchange Server integration bits I am not too sure about.

Curious, you're doing 3D work, right? What do you use your Dell laptop for...?

in all seriousness...no.

On a decent specced lappy, Outlook should be fine. Sounds like your issues are hardware not software in origin.

I've seen some real bad lagginess in Outlook in recent years on colleagues of mine using PCs ... both XP and Vista. Their PCs were fairly new. As in, no hardware reason why an Intel Core with 1GB of RAM on XP connected via wired network cable should be lagging up on simple things like opening a new blank mail window...

Spline has anyone at your workplace been able to pinpoint the cause of your Outlook issues? Are you running Vista? I'm no MCSE so I'm not sure what the troubleshooting/ fixing steps are...

Edit: Also what kind of attachments do you open/ send?

If IT wants to they can look up who's using ActiveSync very easily. Also, if they wanted to, they can turn off ActiveSync on a per user basis. Additionally, iPhone and ActiveSync are completely different than Mac connecting to Exchange

You'll be glad you got 4 gigs of RAM if you plan on using VMWare for any extended use. I've got 2 gigs in my MBP and my machine pages to the HDD pretty hard when I run VMW. I've order a 2 gb stick to get me up to 3 gbs which is the limit on my machine.

You might have been able to use the extra 400 mhz of cpu. Let me know how it goes.

I can't speak about Parallels but VMWare has worked great me.