Oh well the PCIMA card installed fine this time round.

Glad you like Ubuntu, Jenny. I've installed it and Laptop is now dual boot. It will be interesting to see how it compares to Suse.

On thing I noticed in all this which surprised me somewhat was how much longer the Win Install took me which involved some hunting around for Dell/3Com ethernet drivers I'd lost and some mucking about dealing with "unknown devices" - maybe 3 hrs to sort it all out, have working LAN, Internet Acess, Sound card, etc.

I got Ubunto working similary but of course with the addition of partitioning, making dual boot, installation of a full office suite, firefox, etc... and no chages of CD in about 1hr.

Funny, I used to think Linux akward and I will openly admit to being way out of my depth the time I tried to set up Debian a few years back - I'd not a clue what to answer to some of the graphics questions for example. It (or at least some distributions - not sure what Debian is like now) really has come on in terms of catering for the layman since my first look.

That said, I did have some problems with my newer PCs - the AS Rock 64 bit network device (ALI) wasn't supported on the Suse dvd. Had to go through building kernel modules for that. The instructions were clear and it went well but still daunting (at least for me) and time consuming waiting for all the compiling.