OK, just want to say thanks again.

I created a usb boot disk and was able to get Mint10 on it. I reformatted everything, moving travel photos and my mp3 library to and fro.

Was then able to get a copy of W7 on her computer. Install was lovely. DL all the minimum great apps and totally cleaned it up. Thing is running WUltimate beautifully on 512RAM and a Celery M processor. I will go to Fortune and buy another stick (have one) totalling 2gb for her upgrade.

As for my netbook i was able to boot to Mint w/ flashdrive as well. Oh, I really liked it. I played with this a bit. Tried and failed to get it on the hdd, did some reading and now have Mint10 on my hdd! Not only do I love the grown up environment, but everything worked - even on the usb drive! Wireless, Internet, BLUETOOTH (!).

Prior to this I took the disk I had for W7 install and loaded it. Mind you both machines have MS licenses. The netbook came with starter and almost nothing worked, well nothing worked OOB. I went searching for drivers on Asus and loading a ton of drivers (WHAT a hassle!), well..I'll just stay with Mint for awhile :-)

I do have some issues:

I am totally clueless in this environment

Don't understand why things in PREFS are not in SYSTEM TOOLS

I need a firewall (BAD)

Anti-Virus? Yeah, I know the stories about UNIX not needing - but I wants it.

Mint will never support tethering phone, reluctant to use Bluetooth as not secure.

Need iTunes alternative that works (!). Songbird seems to want a signup with LastFM.

Anyway - thanks for the nudge.

I think I will have to load Windows on another partition anyway....kina worried about that.

Now I get to join the Linux forums :-))

I think I will have to load Windows on another partition anyway....kina worried about that.

If you plan to dual boot Windows and Linux, you should install Windows first. The reason behind this is simple: GRUB recognizes Windows installations and will automatically configure itself to allow you to boot Windows. The same cannot be said of the Windows boot loader, however.

Whoops -- double post.

OK, well I will have to go back and reinstall Mint then. Yes, I had read that but I need some things Windows offers just out of ubiquity.

Thanks for the reminder.