I use mostly laptops, and I find Windows to be a better native OS for those given the driver support. For getting things done -- the application space -- Linux is much better. Running a VM is virtually free these days in terms of CPU cycles. You want a lot of RAM, but RAM is cheap. The monetary cost is nothing. I use VirtualBox, but there are other options.
LMDE with Win7 in a VB VM, 8GB RAM with a 2+GHz dual core CPU is more than enough.
Right. I mean I am not saying Linux itself takes that much RAM. It's just that you can't dynamically switch RAM between OSs, so you tend to want twice as much "just in case" as you would running a native OS only. If you can predict your workload well, you can allocate just enough to each OS
Make sure to reserve enough in the host OS if your GPU uses shared memory.
(post is archived)