My computer is totally sucking lately. It's got a pirated copy of Windows that one of my wife's friends installed and didn't do a very good job of. The kicker is she actually bought this PC with Windows installed but it crashed and wiped the harddrive and she didn't have the install disks anymore.

In any case, it's got decent specs in terms of processing speed and RAM, etc. But it's a total dog owing mostly I assume, to the bad set-up.

I don't want to pay a bunch for a legit copy of Windows so I'm thinking of trying one of the free operating systems prior to scrapping the whole thing and getting a new computer.

It looks like Ubuntu might work as we mostly use the computer for web surfing with a few documents and spreadsheets thrown in.

Are there others I should be looking at or is Ubuntu the way to go?

Prior to installing, what do I need to do to get rid of Windows and all the associated crap that's installed on the computer? Or does the install process for the new OS take care of that?

Ubuntu

Format the C: drive first if you want to get rid of everything Windows. Ubuntu should leave your windows stuff intact in case you want to revert or set up a dual boot system.

How does one mess up a Windows installation?

You don't have to format C: before installing ubuntu. It doesn't automatically blow away everything, but you can select the complete format option fairly easily, if I remember correctly.

That'd do it, if the copy were truly pirated and dl'd from the net. Best way I can think of to invite some truly nasty trojans to your machine.

If your windows is FUBAR'd then back up any of your files to a CD and just do a full reformat/install of Ubuntu. It's pretty much a turnkey install.

Cool. I think that's what I'll try. I've got a 500Gig external drive so I'll just load all the files I want onto that and start from scratch.

The guy who set this computer up thinks of himself as quite the computer hacker but he's more of a douchebag than anything and I don't think he knows what he's talking about it.

In any case, however it happened, the computer is performing like crap and I've tried everything I know to fix it (which admittedly isn't much). I used system mechanic, made sure I don't have viruses, uninstalled unneeded programs, defragged the hard drive, etc.

As I mentioned, I don't have the install disks for XP to just do a fresh install of Windows and I don't want to buy a full copy of XP or Vista.

I'll give Ubuntu a try, it can't really get much worse than it already is.

[img][375:500]http://z.about.com/d/animatedtv/1/0/z/q/gf_ubuntu.jpg[/img]

I loaded Ubuntu today and am up and running. They said the disk would take 6 to 10 weeks to get to me but I got it in about 2. The install was a piece of cake. I did a full install that wiped out everything on my hard drive.

I have an external hard drive so I just transferred all my files to that before doing the install and copied them back to my PC once it was done.

So far so good, the internet worked right away without any input from me and everything else seems to be working as well.

I haven't spent much time yet messing around so I'm sure I'll find some things I like or dislike in the future. For now I'm very happy with it.

Good job, though you could have DL'd the cd.

You probably won't fall in love with the office suite, but its good enough to get the job done. The only other gripe I had with Ubuntu was getting it to share folders with windows machines--it may be easier now though.

Otherwise, have fun knowing that you are now a socialist.

Yeah, I didn't download it because their website mentioned imaging the CD and I wasn't exactly sure how to do that. Figured it'd be safer just to order it. And, it was still totally free, didn't have to pay shipping or anything.

I really don't have to use Office at home much so I'm sure OpenOffice will be sufficient. I've got a work laptop for any official work related stuff. The kids will use it for homework but nothing really more in depth than writing papers.

that's funny, the reason I have stuck with it for my personal laptop was precisely because doing this was so easy. but I only jumped on a few versions ago.