Ubuntu or XP Pro?

I'd say that you could make a dual-boot, but the size of your hard drive make me advice against that. 80 GB is not much these days, even with only XP Pro installed.

Your hardware seem to be okay for a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but don't expect the graphical effects to blast of at lightning speed, (depends on the size of your graphics card).

If you deactivate Compiz Fusion your experience with Ubuntu, and the GNOME desktop would be great. After all Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is optimized for the very small Net-book computers so your hardware is sufficient to run most programs even better than they would run on Win XP Pro.

If you're fairly new on Linux I'd also advice against installing Debian 5.0 Lenny. Things are a tad to hard for newbies to grasp quickly. Instead I'd suggest you try out: Fedora, based on Red Hat, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Simply Mepis (newest version), Easy Peachy and distros like that. Don't jump onto the rocket science just yet. Some distros are unforgiving in case you make an error. If you enter a command, either by mouse or keyboard, things WILL be done with out asking further questions. Can get quite irritating if you delete the wrong file or directory.

Lucid may not be the best bet in this case. I would install Ubuntu 8.04.4LTS, run all updates for it (but do not get the distribution upgrade), set it to never upgrade to the next version (LTS or Non-LTS) and run with it as is. 8.04x is supported until April 2011.

Here's you're answer, if you ask me. Install a Linux distro, and then download and install the PUEL version of VirtualBox here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Next, copy an iso image of your WinXP to your hard drive (You'll thank me for doing it this way later), and set that iso as your CDROM device.

Boot the guest (Your VirtualBox virtual machine that is going to be WindowsXP) and the install will occur normally, although quite a bit more quickly than if you were installing from the real CDROM drive.

Once you get to the first iteration of your mACROsFOT O/S, save a snapshot of that iteration and move on. Saving snapshots of appropriately named images of your OS is both important and convenient, for rollbacks, forking the installations, and disaster recovery.

Naming conventions like "clean install - pre SP3", etc., will help to remind you when you want to run your OS in that version or fork the evolutionary tree with other software, etc...

When you're done running your Windows Guest for the day, don't shut down the machine, but just stop it, and then when you want to run it again later it will boot instantly, with all of the running apps you had running and everything!

Hope that helps!

Kindest regards,

Bradley

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I was in the same position a few months ago. Over the years I've kept trying to migrate to Linux, but there was always something that forced me back to Windows.

Since last fall I had been using MS's free Windows 7 Ultimate Edition Evaluation copy that was due to expire at the end of February. Well when it came time, I really didn't want to pay $400 for the license, so I tried Linux again.

And finally, everything just worked. Ubuntu 9.10 installed perfectly, ran stable, never needs restarting, and has everything I need and more. 10.04 is even better. I've been on Ubuntu since February and don't expect to ever go back.

When you fdisk windows it is gone. you use windows. why not keep it?

try different linux distros until you like one. maybe ubuntu or not. run linux in virtual machine like virtual box.

you can keep as long as you want or delete that virtual machine anytime you want real easy with a click or two.

you can also share with read/write all you data that already is there.

when ready, if ever, you can start from scratch but this way you can run windows linux and anything else all at same time simultanesouly.

you can also run new windows 7 (all three xp linux windows 7 at the same time) to see if you like that too or you need to use it.

Up until feburary this year [2011], I also was running XP pro sp3 at work. I was running ms-windows ports of what ever I could.

Then starting about 2 years ago, I started using ubuntu in virtual box in XP. I started this as I had just had my machine reinstalled, and wanted to keep it clean and also put on the software that was not available on ms-windows. [I used cygwin-Xfree86 to make it seemless, it is more reliable that virtual box seemless( for me).]

After a short time I noticed that apps in ubuntu/virtual-box, and the apps seemed faster than when run under ms-windows [ or equivelent apps]. I also noticed that if I had had lots of apps running in ubuntu/virtual-box, it would always use less memory that outlook, and often use little cpu compared to other ms-windows apps.

I see you don't have much memory so virtual box may not work properly, I allocated 512M to ubuntu, but if you use an efficent distro [I have used vector in the past, but there are other distros now], and shutdown outlook, it may work.