dual booting is the best in my experience. but if you do go with a virtual machine...vmware player is good and will run any os you want. i used it for ubuntu. when i needed it. but dual booting with windows 7 is easy.. "easy bcd".... plenty of tutorials on google for that but thats what i use to dual boot. i had a tower setup running windows 7 for my daily user. then a custom xp. and a third install of windows 7 32 bit. then slap ubuntu in vmware player. versatility has its place.
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