[Volvo244T]

I was going to suggest virtualization, but have no experience with Open Source options. I have only used VMWare and that ain't cheap! Something like VirtualBox may be a very good option over dual boot.

Steve

It's a quite viable alternative. I used it successfully for a number of things even on my old Dell inspiron 600M.

But dual boot is fun.

I was dual-booting as well as virtualizing, until my WinXP partition somehow nuked itself... I only did that to play Halo, since 3D games run like shit under virtualization due to the software link between the virtual machine and the computer hardware. Direct hardware 3D acceleration isn't quite possible under virtualization, unfortunately.