Ubuntu interlude

After several years of pain and heartache and watching Windows Vista slowly destroy my laptop, I now have a new lease of life with Ubuntu!
I know this has nothing to do with the theatre or poetry and prose. It has more to do with my sanity. This is how it started.
Now, I am not particularly geeky but I do know that when your laptop takes seven minutes to boot up and then shuts itself down after less than two minutes, then there is something wrong. Since buying it, the wonderful Vista software (a worse virus than any dastardly geek in some computer terrorist cell could ever devise) had been adding more and more programmes to run at start up. With every upgrade (available almost daily) the slower it would become - and these upgrades are supposed to make it run better!?
I had heard various things about Linux software and even gone as far as reading a bit about it. The point was that almost everything I read about it was positive, even the few negative things had a positive side. Being totally fed up with Vista on my laptop I decided to investigate further a few weeks ago. I then ordered an Ubuntu disc. This arrived last week and, having installed it - bliss. In fact the most satisfying thing about it was the installation process. It asked if I wished to a) try it out first by booting straight from the cd drive, b) partition the hard drive so that I could keep Windows and have the option of either, or (the best one) c) delete the entire disc and install Ubuntu. It was wonderfully cathartic choosing 'c'. It was like being reborn. And, it only took five minutes. Plus, with a 100gb disc drive, I now have some 98gb free, instead of 66 just before I installed my new software. I also have Open Office which I had been using before anyway and a host of other familiar programmes, many of which I now realise must have been developed in Linux before being made available for Windows. The only niggle is that to use the BBC i-Player, I need to do some weird things I am not sure about in order to install one of the relevant plug-ins. I'll either read some more on this or find a geek. Either way, it's no big deal.
In the meantime, the laptop now boots up in well under a minute and shuts down in around eight seconds - and when I tell it to, not when it overheats from the junk that Windows Vista runs. Am I happy, yes. Am I remorseful about Vista, no. Would I recommend Ubuntu to the World, of course. Oh, and I didn't tell you the best bit did I. Being open source, community developed software, Ubuntu and all the hundreds of programmes that can run on it are entirely free of charge! Of course donations can be made and rightly and fairly so. Long live Linux.