I tried that...but I don't like the fact you have to divvy up your hardware to use a VM. It's fine if you have and excess of CPU and RAM resources. If not it can be taxing on the host system. Right now with my dual boot setup of my Link Removed, I find myself staying on 8.1.1 Pro and rarely if ever I go back to 7. I don't have the lag a boot up you say you have.
That is a very valid point. The entry point for comfortably running a system under VMware Player or vBox is a quad core CPU and 4GB of RAM. I sometimes run on a Q6600 with 4GB of RAM and that works well. But it is faster on my i7 with 8GB of RAM - especially when running Windows 8.1 on a Windows 7 host. I give 8.1 virtual 3 cores and 4GB of RAM.
For the Linux distros it is easier. There you can get away with 1 core and 1GB of RAM. But you still should have 2 cores and at least 2GB of RAM for the Windows host.
It is possible to run a Linux distro on a 2GB with 2cores system. But you need to be patient. For running Windows 8.1 on a Windows 7 host (or the other way around) using a 2GB, 2core configuration would run like molasses.
Note that all my systems run on SSDs which helps. My virtual systems I run from an external SSD. That external SSD is attached via eSata, USB3 or USB2 depending of what is available on the system where I run. But the different attachment types don't seem to make much of a performance difference - probably because the access time is aways the same.
