I had a similar situation with a netbook I bought that had Ubunto pre-installed on it. I needed to upgrade the media player codecs to play certain videos on YouTube, and I spent the better part of three days trying to get the upgrade to work. Never could get it to install properly.
Linux is a nice OS, but until they make upgrades and installations as easy to do as Windows does, I’ll stick to Windows. I have Windows 7 now, and I absolutely LOVE it.
Are you talking about Ubuntu? There are several distros that update and upgrade quiet easily and simply. I take it you haven't gone all Tiger Woods on your Windows marriage in a while? While Windows 7 IS quite a bit like a Swedish supermodel, but it cannot swing a golf club if you like to swing with lovely Linuxes. I've done a lot with PCLinuxOS and it upgrades and updates easily from Synaptic. Installs all the free software easily and simpler than any Windows machine.