The Ubuntu Experiment - 3 months later

Well, I give up on my Ubuntu based Inspiron 6000. I tried to be good. I spent hours chasing down obscure work around to all of my problems, but in my line of work you almost have to have a PC. Why you ask? Here are a couple of reason's:

1) Most engineering programs only run on a PC now (and emulation by wine or VMWare is too much of a pain, I know, I tried).
2) I use many USB based emulators and interfaces that only run on a PC. This is even harder to get around than #1. Sometime even VWWare doesn't quite work.

Seriously, I can work around most of the problems, but sometime Ubuntu is just not co-operative. The other day my video driver just got really, really slow for some reason. Painfully. I spent way too much time chasing down the issue (It was related to going in and out of presentation mode).

So, I broke down and just went ahead and bought a new PC. I know it comes with Vista (yuck), but I get a free update to Windows 7 next month when it comes out. The final choice a Dell Studio 15 with a processor upgrade that supports virtulization (now I can virtualize Ubuntu). I expect the upgrade process is going to take way too much time.

The Ubuntu Experiment

For the third time since I bought this system, the hard drive has been corrupted to a state where I can not boot the system. This time I decided to take it to the local PC gurus to see if they could find out was wrong. No luck what so ever. However, I was able to use a Ubuntu USB stick to boot the computer and access all of my files.
Windows XP is just seriously broken. If my only solution is to completely reinstall the entire OS every 3 months, then I think it is time to look for a different OS. My only caveat is that I don't really want to buy a new PC at this time. Heck my existing PC is plenty powerful. So, I have decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 6000. No PC, No Mac, just pure open source. I wonder how it will go?