If you are thinking windows, you need to do some home work
Have 12 machines that I use for work. Some are tripple booted, some double some dedicated. Windows is a suckers choice. Why even bother with a system that immeadiately requires the excessive over head and maintenance of anti virus and what? You know even if you do everything right, it is still going to fail. Windows is for lemmings.
Of course sometimes because of customer data transfer you need to be compatiable. Some web apps won't work from some government and other institutions on a non windows machine/Internet Explorer, so you have to use windows to do that. If you see .asp on the URL, you could be introuble. Maybe someday Micorslop's web technology will be standards compliant, Nah, just kidding! Not in the near to medium term anyway. Wine can be problematic so you have to have a test machine before you try to load any new software. I use XP and Win7 when that happens. I'm not a fan of V machines.
Have win 8 installed. One click and you can turn it into win 7 with a learning curve. Most of my customers still use win XP and or win 7. Smart money says that the more cloud becomes main stream, none of the existing OSes are going to matter.
