Dual booting may be a necessary evil, or perhaps a good thing?

[Ira Krakow]

Re:  The HP thread

Sure, it would be nice to erase all traces of
Microsoft from your PC.  But in my case, I migrated
from two perfectly good, networked Windows XP
machines.  I wanted to get up to speed in Linux, but I
still needed my Windows apps for a while (until I
converted).

I considered buying a separate computer for Linux but
rejected it because I felt it would be an unnecessary
cost.  I opted for dual booting, and I now happily
have two XP/Fedora dual booted networked machines.  I
share files and printers between Windows and Linux and
can run either at will.

There are some caveats, such as converting NTFS
partitions to FAT32, and you need to be careful about
disk partitioning, but I saved a ton of money through
the dual booting route, and learned a lot in the
process.

In fact, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea for HP,
Dell, or whomoever, to offer a dual boot option.  Or
perhaps, given your experience, this may be asking too
much.

Ira