[yareally]

I use Windows most of the time due to needing Visual Studio for some Windows related development as well as wanting to play current games in my free time. I also need Linux tools for web and Android development (mainly Android OS modding/compiling).

I supplement windows with a virtual machine running just a Debian terminal interface with 512mb of ram devoted to it. From that, I can run PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Ngnix or whatever else wouldn't be so great to keep on Windows. The added benefit of that is I keep my development enviroment seperated from the rest of my PC so I don't have to keep all the services running all the time unless I need them.

When I do have the VM on, I just keep it running in the background on one core and don't even notice it's there other than the ssh terminal I interact with in putty. As for other Linux needs, I can get by mostly with using Cygwin + puttycyg[1] for scripting python/perl/bash/etc. Overall, I haven't felt the need to use dual booting in a few years since adopting that approach.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/