Two things: Cedega and VMWare

Cedega – Wine configured to allow windows games to be played in Linux. The list is HUGE of compatible games. Can’t wait till I get all the PCs configured in the house, so I can try playing Half Life 2 and Richard Burns Rally on Linux!
VMWare – A virtual machine emulator. I got WinXP installed, and everything runs suprisingly smooth. Dont know how much of a performance hit I’m taking , but I have the capability to run ANY windows software, without leaving the Linux environment. It’s superb!
I will easily take a penalty in speed for such convenience. The only piece of software I have installed within this windows virtual machine, is Catia. By no means a lightweight program, and it ran very nicely. The display update is alittlew choppy since windows OS isn’t taking advantage of the 3D capabilities of the graphics card, but it was very usable.

I have a dual boot set up to go into WinXP, but it seems more and more that I won’t be needing it. I will be phasing it out very soon. The only thing I can see keeping WinXP around (as a second boot) is for games.

Just came accrost this link. Apparently, there is _VERY_ little performance hit (on the CPU) with this Virtual Machine. If I can only get the video performance to be better…