Thanks for the tips guys, I've decided to go with Windows 7.
Has anybody heard of "Tiny7"?
I have 64GB RAM, so I don't necessarily need a lite version of Windows 7, but its interesting as one thing I hate about Windows is its bulkyness. Anybody got any experience with something like this (stripped down versions of win7)?
what dosnt work programming related?
I need to use CryEngine 3. Obviously there's no way of running that in Linux so it seems like a good excuse to finally take the time to install Win, so that I can also run a bunch of other stuff I've been meaning to try out but couldn't get to run via Wine etc.
Tiny Windows is a joke. It's the bare minimum for Windows to run, not to work.
Hopefully you have enough HDD space to install Windows.. ?