Questions about partitioning hard drive and using programs within the virtual machine

Hi everyone,

I'm a new Mac user and while I do like it a lot, there are some things that it just can't do like Windows. I'm going to be purchasing Parallels with Windows 7 for my MacBook but I have a few questions first so that I know what I'm getting into.

First off, after watching a few setup tutorials on YouTube, I've noticed that you need to partition your hard drive when creating the virtual machine. Is there any way around this? Ideally I would like to use the Mac OS and Win7 to view the same files, but is that possible? For example, if I named the Win7 partitioned HD "Windows" and the Mac's original HD "Macintosh", and I wanted to use the Windows Photo Viewer program in the virtual machine to view "image.png" on the Macintosh HD, could I do that even though it's not on the Windows HD? And if I were browsing the web and saved a picture to the Windows HD, would I still be able to access it outside of the virtual machine? Could I still open it in iPhoto or Preview?

Would I also be able to adjust the size of the partitioned hard drive after the initial creation? For example, if in setup I had decided to make the Windows HD 100GB, but later on wanted to expand it to 150GB (and had that free space available on the Macintosh side of the partitioned HD) would I be able to change that? (Same question goes for RAM/memory, I have 8GB memory on my computer right now but would I have to split that between the virtual machine and the Mac OS?)

My final question is about running programs. Since Parallels installs a virtual machine onto your computer, would you then have to install separate programs for that virtual machine? For example, I have VLC media player on my Macintosh hard drive right now. If I wanted to use that program on the virtual machine, would I have to go online and install the Windows version of VLC onto the virtual machine or would it still work "on that side" per se?

I guess what I'm really getting at here is if you can use the original Mac OS and the Windows virtual machine interchangeably with the same set of files and programs. I'm completely new to this sort of thing so any and all information you can provide me with would be useful. Thanks in advance for all your help!

-Valerie

Edit: Ah, one more quick question. I would assume that installing the Win7 OS includes programs such as Paint, etc. Would I be able to add those to the dock even though that's outside of the virtual machine? Again, thanks in advance for your help!