Its a bit of drama but if you have a look at setting up qemu with virtual machine manager its worthwhile.

It makes virtual machines that directly utilize the hardware, meaning you can run your stripped out windows inside a window on your Linux desktop.

Its pretty hard to get your GPU to pass through but if its non-gpu oriented apps you need its perfect. My fixed windows VM boots in about 10 seconds, has next to zero network usage, uses 2 cpus and 4gb of ram, and just runs its couple of little apps no trouble every day