I definitely agree. Linux is great. It would be best to dual-boot it. Basically you partition the hard drive. (but PLEASE!! for the love of god, read up on it if you aren't tech savvy!) What this does, is when you boot up the computer, you have a choice of whether you want to use whatever operating system came on the computer (vista ect.) or whatever distribution of Linux you have.

I dual boot Vista and Ubuntu on my laptop. I hardly EVER use vista...I really hate it. What the commercials don't tell you - its not the initial interface that is horrible, it's when it starts "updating"...restarting in the middle of papers..and just hogging memory compared to Linux.

Another thing to add - I forget if anyone mentioned it, but the installation for a descent amount of programs is a lot different from windows. In windows you kinda just set-it and forget-it. There's a slight bit more "work" involved - in some cases. However, its just a line of text you copy and paste. It's really no biggie.

I can not tell you how great it is to be able to go "you know what...I could really use some video editing software...." and then clicking two buttons- getting opensource software for free. What you want - when you want. It really is awesome. You will really like it.