Jon - part of the reason for getting a bigger hard drive is so that I can organise a dual booting system with one of the options being some variety of linux.
There are practical "work related" reasons why we can't get rid of Windows, but I want to find out what linux is capable of and decide whether I like it or not.
Stilly River Sage - the Amiga was (and still is) a wonderful computer system which unfortunately lost out due to a bunch of bad decisions by the management of Commodore, which eventually forced them to "go bust".
The user interface was years ahead of Microsoft, with a WIMP (Window / I? / Mouse / Pointer) system while Microsoft were still running everything by DOS. In many ways the Windows interface is STILL a long way behind what the Amiga could do over a dozen years back.
The real joy of the Amiga is that it was incredibly efficient. I can still run art manipulation programmes on my Amiga with a total of 16MB ram which will do a better job than the equivalent Windows programme hogging 128MB chip ram and a sodding big hard disk "swap file". The amiga, at the same time would be happily smoothly multi-tasking, running a DTP programme, text editor, Midi sequencer and a "Vector Gaphics" artwork programme.
With the Amiga "Multitasking meant that every programme took its fair share of processor time which made each programme appear to run simultaneously. Compare this with Windows which effectively stops all other programmes working whilst each task hogs ALL the processors for seconds at a time.
The amiga was also ideal for video work as it natively ran in PAL and NTSC video modes, so you did not need to convert your output into another format. It was already in a suitable format for a TV screen whether American or European specification.
I still us my Amiga for certain tasks because it does them better than Windows can, but the machine is over a decade old, has 16 MB RAM and an 80MB hard drive and doesn't have the capacity for certain operations any more.
There are feeware Amiga emulators available (UAE runs in varieties for Windows and Linux), but you need to own the "Kickstart Rom" from a real Amiga before you can use them.
If you do decide to play at Amiga I'll give you what help you might need.
Quack!
Geoff.