My wife has been using 64 bit Vista on her desktop with good success for everything but legacy usb device support. Anything older than a year doesn’t have any 64 bit drivers. But it’s hell on wheels for Photoshop.

-GRIN-

Sigivald: I’m certain you’re right, it’s working now so no complaints from me. Well, I guess there’s that whole “how do I encrypt that partition” train of thought left to explore.

LinuxCanuck: Actually when I said telling the difference was difficult I meant that generally speaking things are the same, I’ve never REALLY had any problems telling the difference, there are enough subtle differences unique to the OSs even before we take the differences I’ve introduced.

The reason for the Dual-boot was specifically for some of the more resource intensive games I have that run under XP and some other XP specific apps. I’d like to have XP accessible but for day to day use Ubuntu is just fine.

I’ve actually been a Ubuntu user for over a year, as I installed it on my Surveillance System DVR Computer over a year ago, and was suitably impressed.

I suspect the reason I put off creating a dual-boot for so long was just that there was so much clutter on our existing HD, it took the uber-crash to motivate me to fix things (isn’t that so often the way?).

Thanks!

Unless you use XP for gaming you can dispense with dual booting by installing VirtualBox or similar VM and installing XP in it. You need a fairly fast processor and lots of RAM for it to be satisfactory, but this allows you to run anything on your Ubuntu box since as far as Windows is concerned, you are using Windows. You cna even have a Windows bar at the bottom and an Ubuntu one at the top on the same desktop, using seamless mode. You can share the same desktop and move files from one to the other. If you are a gamer though, stick with dual booting.

What you may find is that you use Windows less and less and Ubuntu more and more. Ubuntu is so much less hassle. No viruses as you mentioned, but no defragging, no re-booting nags and no programs that run in the system tray without your doing it intentionally. There are other advantages, too. You don’t need to worry about security as much as it is built in with separate user and root areas, password protection and more. You don’t have to search for programmes to install. They are in your package manager and it is just a matter of selecting them from a list. Installed programmes don’t add icons to your desktop and mess up your menu by adding groups for each programme.

Anyone who is considering Ubuntu can try it before they install it running Ubuntu from the Live CD and if they are worried about partitioning they can put the CD in while in Windows and install it in Windows using WUBI. It acts just like any Windows programme and it can be de-installed from the control panel. It sets up a directory on your C drive and runs from that once you re-boot.

Ubuntu takes some getting used to but it will grow on you and soon you will wonder why you did not try it sooner.

Me, despite having run linux for years as a server platform, I prefer running Vista and OSX for my desktops.

-GRIN-

“I use Open Office on the Mac, sometimes it even works…” - Do you mean the Open Office suite or the Mac?

But OpenOffice is also available for most other platforms and in many languages … also for free. So one’d have to be nuts to run a bootleg copy of MS Office … let alone pay for for a copy!!

http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US