Anyone out there know about virtualisation?

[andrewducker]

I have two general cases of use for my desktop:
1) Surf the web and check email. For which a Linux desktop would work perfectly well.
2) Play games. For which I need Windows. And no, I will not spend weeks of my life faffing with WINE or somesuch. Just no.

What would be awesome would be to use some kind of virtualisation to have both operating systems loaded at the same time, and only switch into the one which has antivirus software and all sorts of additional crud installed when I needed to. Not rebooting between them, as this would be clunky and take significant chunks of time, but something more instant.

However, so far as I understand, doing so would be tricky, as things like 3D graphics don't run well from inside a virtualised OS. And so if I was doing that I'd lose the ability to do the thing I find Windows useful for.

Is this actually the case, oh well-educated friends list and passing people? Or is it something I could set up fairly easily?

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I'd repartition and multi-boot. That's the only way you'll get the performance and isolation you want.

[ggreig]

In the unlikely event of running one of the expensive editions of Windows 7 (Ultimate or Enterprise), you wouldn't necessarily have to do the repartitioning to get reasonable performance, as you could boot off a VHD.