Apologies for the very open-ended question but a guy in college told me I could use Cygwin to do Linux stuff on Windows without having to reboot.

I had a machine die a couple weeks ago. I ordered a new one, and borrowed a temp for the duration. One of my key packages is Cygwin, but I can't use the entire suite. Hence there's quite a bit of ...

If you still think that operating systems are tied to hardware, you need to update your thinking; nowadays there are lots of options that let you run one operating system within another or in parallel ...