Quote from: Hungry ghost on January 01, 2013, 09:26 amI'm after a new laptop myself and I will be specifying NOT windows 8. I'm not even sure I want to leave XP! A dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows7 is the aim; although I have been hearing worrying things about Ubuntu 12.x releases. Good luck trying to get a machine without WIndows 8 on it. As far as not wanting to leave Windows XP, XP has just over another year year until it reaches end of life on April 1st, 2014, after which there will be NO more security updates. By that point, XP will be 13 years old. Windows 7 is now about 5 years old, and has been dubbed the new Windows XP, in that people are expected to hang on to it for as long as they can, just as people have with Windows XP. As far as Ubuntu goes, it used to be a good distro, until a couple of the developers decided to switch to the Unity interface, instead of the traditional KDE or Gnome. Unity is hated by just about everyone -- when I tried it, I found its colour scheme nausea-inducing -- it was literally painful to look at. You'd be better off using one of the KDE distros, like Mepis. NC