| I've dual booted in the past and found it wasn't really all it cracked up to be, or making different partitions for that matter. A good use for partitions is if you have two different hard-drives, maybe one small solid state for the OS, and another one for long-term storage.
On top of that, Windows 7 is awesome. My recommendation would be to just keep it all on one partition (if it is one drive) and forget Linux too, or set it up on a different machine. You can make a small partition for Linux, like 30 gigs, but think about what you'd use it for beforehand.
For instance, it could be fun to set up an Apache server in your house for testing; but if you're running Windows most of the time, you can't run them both at the same time.
So thats my 2 cents, 1 big partition (make it raid if you want to have hard-drive fun), no Linux (but maybe a separate Linux box for server fun). | 
