I would also say repartitioning your computer and installing Linux alongside an existing Windows partition is not something to be done lightly. There is a great risk of totally losing all data on your PC if you don't actually understand what's going on. Shrinking and resizing partitions is serious voodoo, especially with freeware Linux tools and NTFS.

I've been using and installing Linux machines since the dark, musty days of Slackware 2 and sometimes I still do it wrong by accident.

VMWare, however is amazing. As is Virtual PC, or VirtualBox. I have a Macbook which quite happily runs XP in a virtual machine with no noticeable slowdown. I also have a Pentium 4 PC which runs Virtual PC with XP inside that.

Both of these virtual computers run MS SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Professional and can easily cope with me running an application and debugging it.

The most important thing is to have enough RAM. My machines have 2 gig each, with 1 gig being given to the virtual machine. I did run VMWare on my Mac with only 1gig of ram and it was awful.

But RAM is cheap

Now the correct way would be to show people how to install Linux completely, then run Windows in a virtual machine