[ubuntu-uk] Dual Boot or Virtual Machine? (Win 7 and 10.04)

[Gordon]

Apologies if this is a duplicate - the original seems to have 
disappeared into the ether....

My Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L40 with a 2-core 1.6 MHz Pentium 
processor, 2GB RAM (the maximum the machine will take) and an 80 GB SATA 
HDD.
My dilemma is this:
The machine has no built-in microphone or webcam. I have a (shudder) 
Microsoft Lifecam VX 3500 which has a built-in microphone which we use 
mainly for Skype video calls. (Also it appears that although there are 
Linux drivers for an HP Officejet J5700 series, the scanning bit of that 
doesn't work).
This webcam works in Cheese, but NOT in the latest Skype version for 
Linux, and I can't afford (at the moment) to buy a new Linux compatible 
Webcam with microphone.

My question is this, which would be the best use of resources on this 
machine - to dual boot 10.04 and Windows 7 or to install Windows 7 
within a virtual machine on 10.04? (Assuming that a virtual machine 
installation of Windows 7 would be able to access the USB port the 
webcam is plugged into...)