Advice re running Windows in/with Linux

Hi Folks,

I'm looking to tap into the combined wisdom of the group.  I've had a 
dual-boot PC for many years, running both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 15.04. For 
Christmas my wife (and brother-in-law) got me a bespoke PC which he put 
together. The specs are as follows:
*CPU* Core i5-4460 3.2GHz (6MB cache)
*RAM* 16GB DDR3
*HD1* SSD 250GB
*HD2* 3TB SATA 3Gb/s
*Graphics* GeForce GTX 750 (2GB DDR5)
*Motherboard* ASRock H97 Anniversary, ATX, (UEFI)

I plan to have my OSs on HD1, the SSD, and keep the other drive for data. 
I'll be running Ubuntu but I also need to have Windows installed, for a few 
legacy applications. Because the machine is custom-built it doesn't come 
with any pre-installed OS. My old dual-boot system worked fine, but it was 
a pain having to reboot to change from one to the other. Which leads to my 
questions:-

*ONE:*
Dual-boot or just boot into Ubuntu and run Windows as a virtual machine? 
What are the pros or cons for each option and how much would they actually 
matter?

*TWO:*
Which version of Windows to use? Windows 10 or Windows 7? Again, what is 
the rationale behind the advice.

*THREE:*
In my old dual-boot system I'd a data partition which I had encrypted with 
TrueCrypt and that mounted on boot, after the password, in both OSs. I will 
need to have an encrypted partition again. Does this influence your advice 
for question one? Also, what strategy for encrypting a partition would you 
use at this stage? I will need access to this encrypted data partition from 
both the Linux and Windows environments.

Many thanks for the advice, and Happy New Year!!!


Jason

-- 
Irish Linux Users Group
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