So recently I got a 250 gig external hard drive and looked around to see what I can do with it instead of just holding files. So I already knew about dual booting, just not how to do it.

I want to bring my external hd wherever I go, and just boot up everything just from my hd. That way I can continue doing anything that I was doing at home, or download anything at friends house, etc etc, without having to do it on their hard drive. So the only operating system I can think of that I can boot from my external drive, is Linux. I have Linux Mint 7, and I need to boot from the linux cd and install it onto my hard drive first. The only thing that's kind of holding me back, is the programs that only windows or mac can use. I know you can use Wine with linux, and use some common windows programs, but I'm still not sure. I would love to boot from windows and linux, but I recently talked to a friend who knows about booting and such, and said it takes a lot to actually boot Windows from an external hardrive.

So what I'm asking is, what would be the best route to go to boot my desktop and computer contents from my friends computers and if booting from Linux Mint 7 is a good idea or not.