I have been in your situation and used VmWare Player + Ubuntu Server with a PuTTY session(s) for terminal access. It worked really well for me. If you have go

I have been in your situation and used VmWare Player + Ubuntu Server with a PuTTY session(s) for terminal access. It worked really well for me. If you have good internet access, then running an AWS micro-instance can be a very good alternative. The nice feature of that arrangement is that you can do some heavy duty processing without bogging down your windows laptop.