[TomGuy]

When was the last time you tried? What distro? Ubuntu/Mint are pretty great at recognizing everything out of the box.

I tried several of those, but it has been a couple of years.

Some of my 'productivity' software and utilities have no Linux equivalent. That is also why I am still on XP and have resisted Win7. I did the upgrade route -- peripherals and software -- when I went from 98 to XP, and it was rather costly, for home use.

[From some of the comments in this thread, I might experiment again with some of the newer Linux.]

[perfect_rovian_storm]

Yeah, it’s worth a shot. Two years is an eon in Linux time. Every time I upgrade to a new version, I’m amazed at what they’ve done.

I run my Windows specific stuff in a VirtualBox virtual machine. I have one with a stripped down to nothing version of WindowsXP that does just about anything I need and it’s lightning fast. Boots up in about 5 seconds. The entire machine takes up 2.5G of space and uses 512mb of ram when it’s running.