That said, if you do go for another machine, you should find it sits happily on a network with your Win PCs. Running the Samba server on the Linux box will allow the Win machines to think they are dealing with another Win machine within a "workgroup". Athrough readily available from the Internet, Samba is bundled with Ubuntu and others and you will generally find some easy to use (rather than editing the samba.conf text file) set up utility.