I purchased a license for Win4Lin when it first came out and it could not hold a
candle to VMWare and have not used it since. To make things even worse it told
you that you could improve
performance by installing qemu, but they did not give the user and easy
way to configure it. In short for a newbie, it would be a nightmare. It was very
fussy about which versions of Windows it would install. It would not install the
Home version, but would install some versions of XP Pro. Sometimes it would
accept a version, but then the installation would not work. When I did get it
installed, it did not allow me to use my sound card or usb devices and it had no
shared folder. It did not have the ability to cut and paste between Windows and
Linux, nor could you drag and drop.

I could do all of these things from VMWare and that was a generation ago. Now
VMware and VirtualBox are even better. To top it off the performance of Win4Lin
sucked big time. To make things even worse they told you that you could improve
performance by installing qemu, but they did not give the user and easy
way to configure it. In short for a newbie, it would be a nightmare. So either
Win4Lin has come a long way or we have different standards. I realize that they
have just come out with a new version, so I may have to give it another shot to
be fair.

I use VirtualBox and recommend it for newbies because it is easier to install
than VMWare and it works well. The only hard thing to do for newbies is to edit
the users and groups so that you belong to the vboxusers group and it is
something the manual steps you through nicely.

I have a Windows VM that I have used for years and I have copied it from one
drive to another and even used it in different distros and it still works like a
charm. You can't do that with regular Windows. I have 3 GBs of RAM and have
given the Windows VM 512 MBs of my RAM and 64 MBs of my 512 video RAM. Windows
performs well and it does not seem to slow Ubuntu down.

A nice thing about VirtualBox is that it allows you to run in seemless mode
which gives you an Ubuntu bar at the top of the screen and a Windows bar at the
bottom. The desktop is the Ubuntu desktop, but Windows apps open on the Linux
desktop and act just like a Linux one. This makes it very usable and way cool to
impress your friends.

If you do not have lots of RAM or a recent processor, then you should stick with
dual booting using Wine if the program works in Wine. You can improve Wine's
compatibility by using Wine Doors (free), Crossover Office (commercial program
by the company behind Wine, Codeweavers) or Cedega (commercial program for
gamers). These programs add more layers of Windows compatibility by including
more APIs, etc and also they make installing Windows programs easy by providing
a menu of installable programs and you do not have to hunt the net to find them.