A VM should not be bogging down your machine much more than using the software normally would.  If it is, you may either have something set wrong or be allocating it too much resources.  The only real problem with them is if you don't have enough ram to comfortably throw a gig at it or if your computer doesn't support or has disabled the features that let VM software take advantage of the hardware directly.  In this latter case, something like VMWare will warn you about it.
No, Cygwin probably can't do it for you.  No, you probably don't have a choice, not without wasting a bunch of time trying to find or build a GCC that's properly configured.  You can probably torture your setup into working.  Or you can set up a Linux VM and SSh/SFTP into it and be done.