Linux is free, if you have access to download a CD or two or three worth of files from the internet and can burn them to CD yourself.

There are also now some distributions (versions) that will run completely off of a single bootable CD, so you can give it a test run on the laptop without actually installing anything. Pop it in, boot it up, and in 5 minutes you are running a full Linux system to see if it is for you. If you find one you like, you can continue to run it from just the CD, or you can switch over to a similar version that does a full hard drive install.

This is a link to Knoppix, which is considered one of the best "Live CD" versions of Linux: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

You have to decide for yourself if Linux is similar enough to Windows to get up to speed as fast as you want. It took me a few weeks to get really proficient, but only a few hours to get it running on a new laptop, and set it up to share drives with Windows machines on my home network, without knowing exactly all how it worked at the time.

You can get a boot disk that will overwrite the original password.
It will then enable you to boot back into 2000.
Without the need to format or install Linux.

Check out http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html and see what version of Linux will work best on your laptop.

Also Knoppix is a pretty good way to see if Linux is for you.
It ain't for everyone :-)

look into the various 'LiveCD' verisons: it'll boot into the Linux CDs OS at an 'F12' w/o loading it on your HD. i did this last wkend to see if this Latitude would choke on Linux - it did not. the only issue was the WinModem which i bypassed by loading a PCMCIA modem card. see 'www.linux-laptop.net' and the SlackWare site.

ok...good thought......thanks!