Hello

I just took delivery of a new Dell E520,Intel Pentium D Processor 820. 1Gig memory and 250G hard drive,Vista Home Premium OS. Previously on my old computer I had a dual boot setup with Xp and Ubuntu. All works fine.

Although my intent is to eventually migrate totally to Linux, I want to use the Vista OS that came on the new computer seeing as I paid for it and am not ready to just dump it. As I occasionally help several others out with their computer 'problems' when I can, a little knowledge about Vista for myself should come in handy down the line.

If I could be totally sure that I could return the computer to its 'new' state with Vista as its OS I would have no qualms about repartitioning/reformatting the hard drive and going ahead with a full install of Linux. I am under the impression that if I do so I will wipe out the partition that Vista uses to reinstall itself and will be unable to get the computer back to its original state. I do not want to jump at this and end up with a worthless system restore disk, and no way of getting Vista back on the computer. I could live very well in the meantime with Vista and Ubuntu (or some other flavor) of Linux on the computer, and then eventually make the full move over to Linux.

Any suggestions on how to proceed? My initial thought is that if Vista has taken over the entire hard drive partition, to shrink the Vista partition and then do a install of Linux into the new free space which I assume will be seen by Ubuntu, setting up however many partitions are needed for the install there. Am I on the correct track. Also I think that to make the dual boot menu work I may have to go in and edit its config file manually. Is this correct.

Any help at this point will be appreciated before I make some changes that I may regret after the fact.

Thanks........Mark