I have a Windows on my machine, cause for some stuff I still need it, (MS Visio, MindMaps and couple of others application that doesn't run fine with Wine). It's a pain in the ass to always boot machine to access 2 or 3 files and stay 15 minutes on Windows.

A couple of years ago I was a big fan of VMware (old times that I virtualize ubuntu on windows), and I felt a lack of OSS on this area. So the solution it's virtualization, with VirtualBox it all comes easy!

VirtualBox, was recently bought by Sun, has 2 licenses: one commercial and one open source. I use OSE and to install it you have to follow these steps:

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-modules-generic

Then add your current user on 'vboxusers'  group

$ sudo adduser someuser vboxusers

Go to applications > system tools > VirtualBox

Now create your Windows VM with the almost NNF (next, next,finish) wizard. It's a piece of cake!