I'm attempting to find people who have used EAC and LAME in Windows via Virtual PC for MAC to find out if it was too CPU costly and affected the MAC too greatly or not.

If it taxes the CPU too much, my final option is to get a barebones PC, install the few things I need on it, then connect to it via Remote Desktop for Mac (Microsoft makes a Mac OS X version) and run it that way. I know it would be faster than Virtual PC but the hardware overhead is greater and the cost is more.