I got a BeOS 5 pro edition CD as a gift from a friend and have since then used it. I haven't installed it as a Whinedows executable, but gave it its own partition and it works fine for me. You may want to check the BeOS forums and help pages (www.befaqs.com is a good palce to start).
BeOS is a powerfu, fast, and reliablel OS, and I would hardly give up on it, even now that the intellectual property of Be now belongs to Palm. I keep my fingers crossed for the guys at http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/ , BeOS is definitively worth the try. The only drawback I found was that hardware support was a little slow, but if you don't need to have the absolutely newest hardware you'll be fine. Heck, there are even drivers for the GeForce2.
