Who am I kidding? "May" need help. I'll definately need help.
The short story: Vista pissed me off, but I'd still like to have a Vista environment available so I can get used to it and learn all it's quirks so when my customers have issues with it, I'll know what to do. My website is all php, and I hate using notepad for websites. Lastly, I want to run a 64-bit of Vista also, just to find out what will work, what can be patched to work, etc.
Currently, I have lots of extra partition space and XP installed. I'd like to not reinstall XP since I just did a week ago, but if necessary I will do it again.
My goal:
Get a Linux-based boot loader (I remember the one we used in my operating systems class in college was much neater than the Windows loader; also if I remember right, it was easy to add in other operating systems regardless of what order they were installed in.
Get a Linux build that I can use for very few tasks, one of them being photo editing, web graphic creation, web site management (would love to have an offline test environment and the ability to just send files live when I'm happy with the test; I've very novice to web pages as well).
Keep XP 32-bit as a failsafe for when something I want to do doesn't work.
Get Vista 32 up and running as my primary OS.
Get Vista 64 up and running for fiddling around with, probably playing Crysis and stuff like that; whatever is 64-bit optimized.
Any thoughts? I have looked at a few Linux builds and I think Kubuntu will probably be best. However, I don't remember enough about the boot loader to do it again, don't remember what it was called, don't know how many there are and thus don't really want to just go Google and get the first thing that pops up...
I'm trying to approach this in an educated and well-planned manner, hoping to keep the "OH CRAP! Did I ruin it?" factor to a minimum.
The short story: Vista pissed me off, but I'd still like to have a Vista environment available so I can get used to it and learn all it's quirks so when my customers have issues with it, I'll know what to do. My website is all php, and I hate using notepad for websites. Lastly, I want to run a 64-bit of Vista also, just to find out what will work, what can be patched to work, etc.
Currently, I have lots of extra partition space and XP installed. I'd like to not reinstall XP since I just did a week ago, but if necessary I will do it again.
My goal:
Get a Linux-based boot loader (I remember the one we used in my operating systems class in college was much neater than the Windows loader; also if I remember right, it was easy to add in other operating systems regardless of what order they were installed in.
Get a Linux build that I can use for very few tasks, one of them being photo editing, web graphic creation, web site management (would love to have an offline test environment and the ability to just send files live when I'm happy with the test; I've very novice to web pages as well).
Keep XP 32-bit as a failsafe for when something I want to do doesn't work.
Get Vista 32 up and running as my primary OS.
Get Vista 64 up and running for fiddling around with, probably playing Crysis and stuff like that; whatever is 64-bit optimized.
Any thoughts? I have looked at a few Linux builds and I think Kubuntu will probably be best. However, I don't remember enough about the boot loader to do it again, don't remember what it was called, don't know how many there are and thus don't really want to just go Google and get the first thing that pops up...
I'm trying to approach this in an educated and well-planned manner, hoping to keep the "OH CRAP! Did I ruin it?" factor to a minimum.
