I've decided to reformat the hard drive on my Toshiba laptop after 2.5 years of use. Initially I used Microsoft's Virtual PC software to install a virtual Ubuntu machine that turned out to have some virtual hardware issues. Later, I used VMWare's software to create another, rather more successful, virtual Ubuntu machine. Finally, I installed a dual boot system so that I could boot to either Ubuntu or Windows Vista. All of these installations consumed hard disk space, of which there was still plenty, but things were obviously messy and so this is an attempt to tidy things up. I intend to run Portable Unbuntu for Windows (link) which allows you to use Ubuntu from within Windows.
POSTSCRIPT: a day later I'm still trying to download the 439 MB file. Every attempt yesterday failed because the download just hung or because it was impossibly slow. The download today seems to be going better predicting 3 to 4 hours rather than 3 to 4 days! Fingers crossed.
