True.millpond wrote:Every new version of Win just creates unnecessary bloat that strains the hardware to make you 'upgrade' your machine.
Use the oldest Win version that satisfies your needs, and dual boot.
I dual boot this machine with XP.
Wine has been improving, and often win apps that are recalcitrant can be coaxed into working by copying over dlls/ocx files from the Win partition.
Not true.millpond wrote: Linux is a programmer's OS bar none. But it has poor driver support.
Win is great for I\O and proprietary apps.
In fact, linux kernel supports the overhelming majority of existing hardware - so definitely, this is not a "poor" support.
Moreover, almost all drivers for very old hardware are still easily available - unlike in case of windows, where the support is intentionally cutted, to force customers to buy a new hardware.
Exactly at the moment I'm using ~15 years old 3Com network adapter, which is supported by Wheezy out-of-the-box - because this old card is faster than that crap embedded into mainboard, and it's firmware-less, so it can't be compromised by firmware-based attacks.
Winblows has very poor I/O performance, especially when it comes to HDD - Linux is 20 years ahead in terms of storage device's transfer management. Technologies like NCQ and TRIM ATAPI extension were designed only to raise the poor performance of NTFS, which is just total crap.
Not to mension, that real-time I/O access is far easier and simpler to achieve in Linux.
Regards.
/Edit:
Regarding the question in topic:
Since I'm still writting apps for winblows (from time to time, if someone wants to pay for this) I have both XP and win7 installed in a VM.
IMO this is far better solution than using win as a host:
1. Even the latest version of winblows are somtimes damaged by updates, viruses, etc - VM offers differential backups, which are very slim, easy to manage and fast. No more broken winblows
2. Since linux as host is ten times faster and has better HDD and cache management, then winblows works much faster in a VM than as a host OS
/edit.