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I've recently left OSX for my development machine (I like Ubuntu better) but find I am missing out on Photoshop, so I created a Windows VM for using Photoshop, and it's working pretty well (I have a ton of RAM so I was able to allocate 8GB to that VM while it's running and it feels pretty good). I'm not a fan of developing on Windows BUT I do, on occasion, contribute to dotnet projects.

I'm using the VM, but have also considered an external install of windows (I only have a 256gb SSD, but I have an external SSD the same size I could use with USB 3).

There are advantages to both. The dual-boot would be more performant than a VM, but since I hate doing any sort of web development on Windows (nothing seems to work as smoothly or as quickly as it does with unix) I spend most of my time on Ubuntu and would have an easier time using a VM for most of my work.

Is there any way I can use a VM AND Dual Boot to the same Windows install, so that I wouldn't have two separate Windows Environments on one PC? Sometimes I'd like to just boot into windows but usually I like to use a VM.

Shane Lessard
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Despite the technical hurdles (which are actually fairly trivial), using Windows as both a host and guest is not practical because of Microsoft's longstanding anti-piracy measure that ties a Windows activation to a specific set of hardware. In your case, every time you switched between using Windows as a VM and as a direct host, it would prompt you to activate Windows once again.

In essence, it's possible to set up, but the specific licensing of Windows prevents you from doing this.

See this related question: Why is it I can't use my Windows installation both as a host and a guest?

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oldmud0
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