hummer010: 1)
Yes. I sure wouldn't recommend it though. I imagine it would be a great way to hose to OS's at once! Linux is very flexible though - if you're just looking to try it out, you can generally run it from just about anywhere: CD-ROM, External Hard Drive, USB Stick, etc. Most install's will also resize an existing partition to create a new Linux partition for you. There is always some risk of data loss though, and it can take a long time.
2) I can't say with any certainty, but I wouldn't think it would make a noticeable difference. There are some instances I've heard of where a game works better in WINE than on windows, but I've never seen anything like that first hand.
RWarehall: Thanks! I've always heard that adding a partition "later" was rather problematic, just wondering if that had changed and it appears it has not.
As to my other question about Linux speed vs. WIndows and overhead, I wasn't so much interested in whether Linux would run a Windows game better than Linux, I was wondering if it common that Linux ports run better than their Windows sisters.
Linux isn't picky about what it boots off. If you've got a USB hard drive, you can set it up on that. You can even leave your main hard drive entirely untouched if you choose to install the bootloader on the USB hard drive and then access it through your BIOS's boot menu (F8 or F12 on all of the mobos I've owned but you may need to turn off fast booting in order to have time to press it).
As for speed, it really depends on the quality of the port and that varies. (Same with Windows ports of console games, really. They can be excellent or garbage.)
I remember seeing benchmarks saying that Wine beats real Windows on everything but graphics because of how much more efficient the Linux kernel and filesystems were compared to the Windows kernel and NTFS, but the overhead of the runtime DirectX-to-OpenGL translation for graphics eats up the difference. (That's part of why they're working to move it into its own thread. So it can sit on another core if the game's threads need all they can get.)
HypersomniacLive: Cheers.
I also know that you do practically not much else than browsing the web and emails with that system. I'd like to be able to do more than that, ideally all the things I can do using Win XP.
Thank you all for the advice on the desktop environment.
hummer010: If you're willing to learn a new type of interface, there are plenty of extremely lightweight window managers out there.
and [url=https://i3wm.org/]i3 are the two I use. Out of the box, both are quite a bit different interface-wise than windows. Openbox can be made to be prety windows-like using some sort of taskbar like tint2 or such, but doing so reduces some of the lightweight-ness.
i3 is a tiling window manager, which is very different from windows. There's definitely a learning curve to i3, but I'm finding it's my favorite these days. I rarely fire up openbox anymore.
I also don't run any sort of "desktop environment". No graphical login or anything. I log in to a terminal, and xinit if I want X - that frees up quite a few resources as well.
...or, if you don't mind a sort of Windows 9x aesthetic, IceWM gives you a WM and panel in one and, last I checked, it was roughly as light as Openbox.