I made heavy use of Cygwin throughout college for most of the tasks you listed(mostly programming and LaTeX). It worked well for me since I commuted and would rather do my work at home. I was too lazy to put a true Linux OS on my box. Cygwin could work well for you as well since it lets you work in a Unix environment through Windows, and setup is a breeze for the most part. Once you get comfortable with using it then you could go dual-boot, but Cygwin would be a nice way to get your feet wet. I'm sure most of the readers here will trash this idea, as a lot may see Cygwin as "impure", and heck maybe it is, but it also might be the right choice for you. Just make sure to use the Xwindows version of the shell, it's much nicer, use the "startxwin.bat" in "\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin" to launch it instead of the shortcut it puts on your desktop. I really liked being able to run Unix and Windows apps concurrently. The biggest drawback I can see is that you would have to recompile any code you wrote if you wanted it to run on a true Linux box since cygwin binaries only run on cygwin, but you shouldn't have to modify the source at all to do this.
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Perhaps the federal government requires them to make all phone calls traceable?
Bah,I finally get around to updating to XP and Microsoft has to go off and release a new version...
I made heavy use of Cygwin throughout college for most of the tasks you listed(mostly programming and LaTeX). It worked well for me since I commuted and would rather do my work at home. I was too lazy to put a true Linux OS on my box. Cygwin could work well for you as well since it lets you work in a Unix environment through Windows, and setup is a breeze for the most part. Once you get comfortable with using it then you could go dual-boot, but Cygwin would be a nice way to get your feet wet. I'm sure most of the readers here will trash this idea, as a lot may see Cygwin as "impure", and heck maybe it is, but it also might be the right choice for you. Just make sure to use the Xwindows version of the shell, it's much nicer, use the "startxwin.bat" in "\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin" to launch it instead of the shortcut it puts on your desktop. I really liked being able to run Unix and Windows apps concurrently. The biggest drawback I can see is that you would have to recompile any code you wrote if you wanted it to run on a true Linux box since cygwin binaries only run on cygwin, but you shouldn't have to modify the source at all to do this.