I setup a dual boot system with WinXp and Ubuntu and love it. It makes the migration much easier as you can always return to windows if something just won't work like Quickbooks.

Ubuntu runs much faster and a lot cooler on my HP laptop. If your a little more tech savy than the masses I would suggest giving Ubuntu a try.

Cheers

Craig

I am on a Ubuntu only path. First me, then the kids, now my wife. Every one in on Ubuntu. Two of us, my wife and I, have dual boot systems so we can play games, but everything else we do is in Ubuntu. For Quicken, we run Virtual Box to run a WinXP session in Ubuntu so we can check the bank. But for everything else, Ubuntu is the way, the truth and the light.

I gues that there is no reason why you couldn't use Ubuntu's tools to rescue you all yoru data from the world of Microsoft and put in safely in the right places in /home/you. You could then move to another Linux distribution and simply reinstall your /home/you directory and carry on ...

is simple is fast is safe

I finally installed Ubuntu 7.04 to dual-boot on my wife's Windows XP-based HP laptop. With a little help from Google, I configured her Thunderbird email files and My Documents folder to be visible under both operating systems, and set up the Del.icio.us toolbar in Firefox to sync bookmarks.

This made the transition quite easy, since she could do pretty much any work she wanted in either operating system, and thus didn't feel any pressure to favor one over the other. After a couple of months, she finds that she prefers Ubuntu for most work, since it's much faster and more stable. Win XP gets used to run PageMaker (which isn't wine compatible), and the occasional Windows-specific game (not to discount Ubuntu's huge menagerie of casual games, of course!).

The only fly in the ointment is that, if Win XP suspends and she switches to Ubuntu, My Documents and the email file remain locked by Windows and Ubuntu won't touch them. (This rather impressed me, actually - I hadn't even thought of this scenario, a tribute to the care that the Ubuntu team puts into their product.)

Overall, however, it has been a smooth upgrade path from Win XP to Ubuntu. If I had any, I think I'd sell my Microsoft stock now. :-)