I've used dual boot many time over the year and I'm not a big fan. Hosting secondary OSes always works best for me with Virtual Box or similar.

Over the summer I had Ubuntu running native with a hosted XP for the few things that didn't run on Ubuntu that I needed. I kept hitting problems with printing, too few printer manufacturers support by Ubuntu, so I gave up and reverted to Vista running native, Ubuntu hosted. I really liked Ubuntu a lot and was so disappointed when it just got too difficult.

Simon