Linux

I guess this is the piece to the puzzle that I didn't know. Last time I played with LINUX was years ago, it was Gentoo, and I was helping a buddy at work try and make it cooperate with Lotus Notes. So I assumed that any app would work with LINUX if you used enough elbow grease.

Thanks for the correction.

Don't let that stop you. Do a little research on the available applications and you may be happy to switch. I run Ubuntu on my laptop exclusively, though it dual boots Vista for my wife, who hates change. I have OpenOffice and lots of other open source apps that I've installed that let me do everything I was doing before. Even a couple dozen games to keep me occupied. So it's a viable alternative. I can be up and running in about 30 seconds and shutdown and powered off in about 10 or 12. It's fast and it works. Give it a shot.

And I have to say here... so indulge me...
"Windows, we don't need no stinking Windows... "

Thanks. You and Jim both mention a dual boot setup. That's sounds like maybe a good place to start. Baby steps and all that. But you also mentioned that installing it will reformat my drive during installation. Is that true even if you configure it for dual boot?

I think Ubuntu is capable of shrinking an existing NTFS partition to make room for itself, assuming, of course, it's not already full. I haven't tried dual booting that way, myself, last time I "chickened out" and put Linux on a seperate drive in the same computer. Take appropriate precautions of course, back up your stuff first. The linux NTFS tools are quite good but making the installer do what you want, well, an installer that's too friendly can assume you want to reformat or something... Well, yes and no. It's extremely hit and miss. And lots of things these days demand things well beyond basic Windows such as modern versions of IE and bits and pieces of .Net.

You also mentioned importing settings, not just using something. Copying settings from one computer to another can be a hellish enough job inside windows, let alone extracting it and converting it to something WINE can use.

I'm thinking I might chicken out too. I'm thinking I might try using Partition Magic. I have 65GB of free space on my main drive. I think the best way may be to partition 40GB for Ubuntu. Is that enough? I'm having a hard time finding out how much space it needs. Some people say 2.5GB and others say 20-25GB.

40GB should be a good amount of space. 2.5GB might be "enough" in sheer technicality but if you're installing a full-blown GUI with all the frills, that doesn't leave a lot to actually live in.

I personally like a "full frills" install when I do my linux installs, so 40GB is a decent size to accommodate that.

As for the Windows apps, you may have some luck installing some of them through WINE. I've had intermittent luck with doing that myself- most of the time it's just playing with the required dll's until you get things in place to work correctly. The best luck I had was by placing WINE into XP emulation, and then copying the entire system32 directory from a WinXP box. I wasn't able to get some of the more complex programs (like MS Office and other high-overhead apps) working, but I had fairly decent luck with a lot of different games and apps by smaller companies using WINE.

A lot of the apps (like Office, PhotoShop, etc.) have open source counterparts that work in similar fashion (OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.), and can understand the MS formats, so those may be options to replace some of your apps.

If you have significant functionality that you want to preserve with the apps that you currently have, I'd recommend going the dual-boot method until you can verify which apps will work (or can be replaced with open source equivalents) and which apps will take more time than you want to spend to make work, before eliminating your Windows partition completely.

Hope this helps!