An hour? With the patches, you can install windows in an hour. But patching it (and you usually dont have to worry about drivers these days) takes 2-3 at least.

But it pays the salary.

Well, the actual installation only took about 20 minutes. Add the downloading, compiling, and installing of the proprietary graphics driver and doing a bit of reconfiguring some things to suit my personal taste, it took about an hour total (that includes transferring my personal files from the USB drive to the laptop).

Mason,

Does Slackware work good on a second drive? My laptop has 2 drives and I figured rather than creating a partition, maybe I can install it on the second drive. I am very interested in trying this out.

Yes, it can be installed on a secondary drive, it just takes setting up the boot loader correctly. IN all honesty, if you aren't very experienced with Linux I wouldn't recommend Slackware as a first distro as it's pretty much a hands-on, configure manually sort of distro and can be frustrating for someone who's just learning about Linux.

If you're interesting in really getting in to Linux and learning, and willing to get your hands dirty, Slack is about the best way to go, but if you're just looking for something that "just works" pretty much right out of the box I'd suggest going with a more automated GUI-centric distro like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, or Fedora.

Yes, it can be installed on a secondary drive, it just takes setting up the boot loader correctly. IN all honesty, if you aren't very experienced with Linux I wouldn't recommend Slackware as a first distro as it's pretty much a hands-on, configure manually sort of distro and can be frustrating for someone who's just learning about Linux.

If you're interesting in really getting in to Linux and learning, and willing to get your hands dirty, Slack is about the best way to go, but if you're just looking for something that "just works" pretty much right out of the box I'd suggest going with a more automated GUI-centric distro like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, or Fedora.

Well if you think it's that important that you had to say it twice, OK, will due.

lovely JU glitches

OK, I decided to try out PCLinux OS yesterday and so far looks pretty good. May find myself exploring this OS a lot more now. I have to figure out how to get it installed on my PC though, I was using the LiveCD version of it. Talk about having to get use to a whole new desktop. Feel like when I tried Vista or Mac for the first time. I will post about my experience with it after I mess around with if for a while. Thank for the suggestion Mason. This will definitely improve my PC knowledge.

The LiveCD for PCLinusOS has an installer included. It's a pretty good one actually and is pretty much automatic after you answer some basic questions.

You need to be very cautious regarding the partitioning. Make sure you understand what you're going to be doing there or you could wipe out your Windows OS completely.

The best way to go is to clean up and defrag Windows, and then resize that partition to create some free space for the Linux OS. You can then tell the installer to use the free space to create the needed Linux partitions.

Also, have it install the boot loader to the MBR. When you boot the machine you'll be presented with a menu that allows you to boot either Linux or Windows as needed.

Cool, I hope not to screw it up. I am gonna install it on a second drive so I hope that does not mess up Windows. Though it's no biggy, I have all my personal stuff separate on a different hard drive from Windows and many of my things such as pics are duplicated on my wifes PC in case one of the 2 crashes. I can always reinstall the few programs I currently have since they are basic stuff if necessary. But I will be very cautious. I was trying the install link but I guess because the OS was doing updates it didn't let me. I wll try again this afternoon after I get my COD4 fill.

Hmmm it wouldn't be doing any updates from a LiveCD. Did you try double clicking it?

I forgot about the second drive thing, you can let it use the entire thing, just make damn sure you select the correct drive. Install the boot loader to the MBR of the primary drive.