[Inori]

Running virtualized is perfectly fine, I do it all the time. I'm a gamer, so I need Windows, and I prefer not partitioning my drive out of fear of royally fucking everything up (again), and I like not having to reboot whenever I switch. In fact, if you want/need a bunch of Linux environments like I do often, virtualization is the right way to go.

If you do decide to dual-boot, and there's nothing wrong with that, you can actually convert the virtual disk images (.vdi files) that VirtualBox generates into raw images, then flash those to devices on disk, effectively turning a virtual environment into a physical one. I'll probably do a tutorial on this pretty soon, so keep a lookout for that.

So partitioning the harddrive would prolly make the OS run much more smoothly opposed to running it virtually?

Running a virtual instance shouldn't affect the guest OS's speed much, if at all. It might make the host a little slower because there's now two system's worth of processing power and memory being used, as well as all the r/w operations to the virtual disk.