If you're comfortable with Linux, is that + Wine not an option? I've seen where people have gotten the Adobe Creative Suite working in Wine, but I dunno about AutoCAD. I only use Windows for gaming (literally nothing else), so can't help on the quality of life stuff.
My experience with Wine is that it's great until something breaks, and then it turns into a time sink trying to get software you depend on to work properly. I'm considering doing it the other way around and run Ubuntu or something in Virtualbox to get a proper feed reader, terminal and some other nice things.
The Linux, Linux uber alles crew generally suggest such things because they assume you want to run Linux (and occasionally do stuff in Windows when you absolutely have to). Having taken a long, hard look at things, you can't reasonably do production in a virtualized Windows environment. You can, however, run your email and internet inside a linux environment. It actually protects you better against viruses and malware. The downside is if you look at it funny it will break and all the linux people will look at you like you're a fucking moron who doesn't know how to run a computer before giving you a half-dozen shell commands to try to fix the problem. Creatives, be they architects, sound mixers or machinists, have no choice but a professional, legacy environment. Anything designed to run in a company big enough for an IT department is going to run on Windows first, mmmmmaybe Mac if it's advertising-related and Linux not at all.
That could also make sense. Tangential question: what feed reader do you use?
Thanks ... I've struggled to find something. Honestly, what I really wish is that InstaPaper weren't so useless :/
For some reason mac users seems to be the only ones spoiled with good native RSS readers. If you're fine with using a web browser Feedbin and Inoreader are good, Feedly is decent. I use RSS for discovery, Pinboard for bookmarks and managing my reading list and the built-in reading view in Firefox to read articles.
That's really more effort than I want to put in to setting something like this up. I'm also looking for something that can handle things offline, since otherwise I can just read things in the browser.