Wubi paranoid friendly?

[MR ZenWiz]

I suppose that if one simply MUST have multiple OSs on a single piece
of hardware and a) not enough memory for virtual machines or b) enough
patience to wait out the hideously long boot-reboot-reboot sequences
involved, then yes, a multiboot setup would be appropriate.

OTOH, for a person who actually needs access to that many different
OSs, hardware powerful enough to support virtual machines seems to be
a necessity more than a luxury.

For myself, Linux (Ubuntu for now) provides 95% of everything I
actually need on a computer.  I have a few programs that only run
under Windows (a CD label-maker, Photoshop and Illustrator), so for
those I use a Windows VM.  I also occasionally like to play with other
variations of OSs, such as CentOS 5 and soon Windows 7, just to be
more familiar with those systems and so I know enough to help my
clients who run them - mainly Windows 7, with which I am not that
familiar yet, and for those kinds of situations a VM does me just
fine.

VMs have the huge advantage of not interfering with the base machine
operations while still allowing access to the OS environment of desire
for whatever task doesn't run on the base machine's OS.

I expect I'll be getting a laptop in the not-too-distant future that
has enough power to run a VM (or two), at which time I might actually
use a VM on it, but until then my Ubuntu laptop does more than enough
of what I need a laptop to do, and having Windows as the base OS for
any machine I use is something I have outgrown for many years.

Them's my $0.02.