Well, you are right in the case of using Windows. I surfed a lot of suspicious
commercial sites, a lot of online games sites, downloaded all the attachments,
opened almost every spam message, installed a lot of software.
The result was that the antivirus ate up 3-4 viruses/week on a regular basis,
and for the first time my Windows XP installation got almost totally compromised
in 4 months. I will not say what happened later.
I would say Windows is OK for running Windows software and some DOS software
for which there is no equivalent or something similar in Linux and which do not
run in Wine and Linux is almost ideal for the Internet. "Don't worry, be happy
!". And it is cool !
I do not have what to use Windows for. I test some Windows variants in
Virtualbox, however. Virtualbox is OK. In the case of dual booting I would
advise the use of two hard disks and to disconnect the Linux hard disk (just
unplug the power cable from the Linux hard disk) in case of reinstalling
Windows. I had to do the same when installing Linux (Xubuntu alternate) on the
Jetflash.
Anyway, I aggree it is better to use virtualization instead of dual booting.
In Virtualbox one can have a lot of virtual machines. A long string of Linux
distros and Windows or Unix variants (this might be stupid). And one can run
some OSes in parallel if there is enough RAM and processing power. I ran either
two Windows variants in parallel or one Windows and 2-3 Linux distros and filmed
this. I also took some pics for demonstrative purposes.
I will install OpenSolaris today.