Right now my laptop runs WinXP Pro SP3 w/ cygwin, and I'm getting a new laptop. I don't want to have Windows as the main operating system any more though. I can get everything I want with Windows and cygwin, but I'm sick of the patch cycle and the way Window's installations seem to decay over time. Instead I want to use *nix (probably some Linux) as the main (core) OS, but I want to be able to use Windows from time to time(for Visual Studio and games).
It seems that I have two options:
1) Get a dual boot laptop and keep an image of my Windows partitions handy, so that I can write over it and take it back to a clean starting state just as necessary. Have another, shared partition, to let me move data from one OS to the other.
2) Get a laptop that boots into *nix, and run Windows inside a VirtualBox.
(2) seems like a cleaner solution in lots of ways, but I can imagine that I might have some difficulties. In particular, it seems to me that laptops can be quite picky about hardware and drivers. How difficult would it be to get games that use 3D graphics cards to run cleanly in a VirtualBox on a laptop? Would the easiest solution be to migrate the default installation of Windows that the laptop will come with to a VirtualBox? What other problems might I experience with the VirtualBox?
Sorry that this is so vague, I'm just wrapping my head around the possible options of using VirtualBox. If you've had any experience with this particular problem* though please let me know!
Thanks
Christo
* This particular problem is: laptop, with *nix as core OS and Vista/XP as a guest OS.