Weeeeellll....yes you can use ext3 in conjunction with windows just fine without any hackery wizardry.

Ext2Fsd

To coin a very old commercial I love to repeat...aimed at kids waaaayyyy back in the day...
"Hooked on Phonics works for me!"

I use Ext2Fsd in 1 of 5 hard drives I swap in and out on my toshiba portege m780 convertible tablet/ laptop that has win 7 on it. I use a secondary hard drive tray do-hickey that I pop in and out instead of using the dvd tray.
This is the sucker in fact.

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/390692242792?...84.m1436.l2649

$12 not bad.
these secondary hard drive trays work beautifully in the toshiba portege m780. I also have one meant for my other toshiba portege m700. (cheaper too)
And they also work beautifully in my 3 thinkpad t400's and my t430 as well (there is a tray model that is perfect for them too)...it's one of the many reasons I bought my toshiba proteges and thinkpads...utilizing swappable hard drive bays instead of having the dead weight of the dvd tray in the bay.

-Thus I have Win7 (optimized for convert. tablet for graphic work) on a 160 gb hard drive.

-my graphic work distros 'buntustudio and avlinux on another 160 gb hard drive.

-my fun distros bodhi-linpus-kubuntu1404-plasma5neon-and sparky linux game over edition (taking a wee bit more drive space than the others for my gaming) on a 320 gb hard drive

-lastly my work and rolling releases Deb- Kaos- Lmde- Semplice-and Epidemic on a 250 gb hard drive.

oops forgot about "Tiny" .... I have source mage and parabola on a 80 gb hard drive too.

Doesn't seem like I have much space on each...
and I don't
I get away with it simply because... internally on the toshiba m780 where a single hard drive should normally be statically mounted with an operating system....I have a 1 tb hard drive formatted to ext3 with all my work files, music, film, etc. essentially it is my external storage put internally. Very very very convenient set up ..it's quick and efficient and it means I don't have multiples of the same files or programs on each and every distro. But each and every distro can access them. Also it is convenient to keep my files safely in ext3 on a separate drive in case anything goes wonky-wonky with any particular distro...especially those tempestuously chimeric rolling releasers

And all my distros on all my easily swappable hard drives including my win7 access the static internal hard drive quite amicably...been using this ext2fsd quite some time now quite happily...install it on your windoze system...voila!...you can see, utilize, read and write to ext3 no prob.
Bang done.
endsormeans your uncle!


http://www.ext2fsd.com/