By trade, I am a scientist. After moving to a new research group, I found it necessary to compute efficiently. I am not sure how one would go about scheduling 100,000+ single-processor calculations on a Windows box to be submitted to a supercomputer (without downloading CygWin - a Linux terminal emulator). By the way, over 90% of the world's supercomputers run on Linux. I estimated that my particular computation job would take over 4 YEARS if handled only one at a time.