Hey Matt
Actually Ubuntu is not a perfect system yet. Even if you couldn’t afford Vista, you can stick for XP ; as it remains the best operating system for the recent time. I have heard all the fuss about Linux years ago and how great it is with security, and crash free problems, fast performance etc, and I have tried Suze 10 for couple of weeks and Lindows, then Ubuntu, but I had less production results on Linux platform compared to what I had in Windows, and let’s not be specific about this. I mean generally speaking, software developed for Windows has more quality than its linux alternatives and easier to use. May be getting used to linux requires more time and devotion, but the question is: Why ? the security ? you can still tweak Windows and secure as much with additional utilities and firewall software, disable unnecessary processes, adjust built-in security policies etc. and it’s a proven fact that there is no absolute security in any system in the world. It heavily depends on the user level and the way you tweak your system, whether it’s Windows or Linux or Mac. You can say that Linux would be as secure as a well-customized / tweaked Windows system, equipped with relevant security suit. Now what? the performance? the good looking? the user interface? the stability? well , for the appearance you have hundreds of Windows styling software, with thousands of themes and skins. for the performance to be honest I never noticed much difference. Suze, Lindows, Ubuntu responds has almost the same performance levels as Windows XP. and even if you tweak Vista heavily and disable many unnecessary components you can reach a near level of performance. I had a Sony UX UMPC with XP installed, and I upgraded to vista Business. of course it was heavy as hell, especially on 512 Ram, then I tweaked it and eventually had a huge performance boost similar to XP performance. I’m talking now about good reasonable machines not the old ones. For the stability, there is no big difference. This issue was true 100% during Windows 98 and ME days, but after Windows 2000 hit the market , crashes and stability issues decreased very significantly. Now it happens once in a while and for my surprise I spent a year with Vista never having any crashes, except when I installed or used non-stable software. On the other hand, Linux also had crashes similar to XP and Vista. However, this issue can be solved with creating a hard disk image using Acronis or Ghost, after perfecting your Windows system, then you have nothing to worry about, if you moved the Document ,Desktop, Favorites location to another partition, all what you have to do in any disaster is to boot from Acronis CD and restore the image. all your files will be there, nothing will be lost. only the system will be restored to the perfect status. Just make sure you don’t store any important files on the primary partition (e.g. C:\) and there you go. If you can’t boot or been infected with a virus, or spy ware, just few minutes and everything will be great again.
The only big advantage of Linux is the cost. It’s Free, and lots of it’s software is open source and free as well. That’s all.
But give me a break man ! I mean how can you miss all the great software developed for Windows and the experience to deal with it in many places and around the world, just because you would rather save the money? I mean if you are in a situation that requires Windows software related experience, you would miss the skill to manage it ? Think of it as paying the money to invest in yourself. Rather than responding with something like: (Oh, actually I’m not a Windows user, I’m on Linux, so I don’t know about you guys but we have great stuff too! so you should come on board with us!), wouldn’t be great if you deal with the situation directly and do what’s need to be done? Let’s face it: Windows world is different from Linux world, and if you think by gaining experience on Linux software you will be able to deal in with Windows software too? May be on some levels, but for deep issues if you ignored Windows completely, you will miss working out some rich software features. OK Windows OS itself is simple , but I’m talking now about the software developed for Windows, it has alot of insides that you are gonna miss if you ignored it and preferred to work on Linux alternative. May be if you live in a Linux society, where majority of people and business are heavily depending on it, I would agree with you, but if you look around, the dominance is for Windows. Majority of software and hardware is designed specifically for Windows and some of these are exclusive. You can’t let your primary OS Linux , then after you completely adjust to it and become confident and comfortable , face a situation that you wouldn’t be able to connect some peripherals or couldn’t run an important software to use. Linux is great , but not as primarily OS. You can have it and learn it on the side, waiting for the day it becomes the dominant, then you can ignore Windows completely. Until then , just have it on virtual machine or use the dual booting.

Wow thanks for the great comment.

Now I am running iATKOS, google it, on my laptop but I am now running Vista inside of it, I need upgrade to 2gigs of ram but I think I keep the system like this.

Once again thanks for the great comment!!!