I require that it will work with all windows applications. How to set this up ? Will I lose performance ?
You will lose a little performance with Windows apps. The most compatible way of doing is is to run XP as a guest opertaing system in a virtual machine using VmWare or the Linux kernel virtual machine support. There are lots of benefits in running a guest OS in a VM including very easy backup/restore. You need to make sure you have plenlty of memory if you go down this route. Some Windows apps will run using Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) but getting them set up may be tricky and operation might not be 100% reliable.
If you require win apps you're going to have to use windows anyways, you'll just be running it w/in another OS, which can cause its own problems. Either switch to comparable open-source apps (Open Office, etc) for Linux, or stick w/windows. Otherwise, what's the point? Harold
Could be lots of reasons, but typically you have one or two "must have" Windows apps, and for everything else you use Linux and open source software. In my (admittedly old) experience with VmWare, I had very few problems and I'm sure things have advanced significantly since that time.
I tried this and it did not work for my trading. I also tried Sun OS's and that did not work. After all that time and expense including getting a Linux network engineer over here for 10 hours, I gave it all up and went with WinXP. My original hope in trying it was to run an OS which would only run the programs I want (trading) and not run all 50 or so services which Bill Gates seems to think I should have running. Well, those other OS's run a bunch of services as well, and the best trading performance is in WinXP by a long shot. I'm not saying Linux won't work for you. Many people enjoy it every day. But for me I'm reluctantly sticking with the Gates empire and Win XP.
Dont understand why you want to switch to Linux and still insist on running "all windows apps". You need to list which apps are critical to you and then see if Linux will support them.