There's one less Windows install in the world...

There's one less Windows install in the world,
There's one more Kubuntu in the sky,
XP I'll never forget you
It's tough but I'm gonna get by.
There's one less place at Bill's table,
There's one less tear in my eye.
(with apologies to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Joseph)

If you couldn't guess from the slightly cryptic re-packaged lyrics, Windows annoyed me one last time the other week, fragging it's own boot sector, which leads to the unhelpful 'error reading disk' on reboot.
No amount of chkdisk, fdisk /mbr, or bootcfg from the 'recovery' CD seemed to work (with the latter telling me to chkdisk, which I did, only then bootcfg told me to do it again). Even reinstalling didn't fix it.
I'm fairly sure the disk hardware isn't at fault as I've subsequently thrashed it for hours on end with no ill effects. And I don't think it was Wheezy leaving me a sappy love note :-)

So I've thrown away my Windows install (rm -rf /media/hda1/windows feels so good !) in flavour of the Kubuntu flavour of the Ubuntu flavour of the Debian flavour of Linux (so much choice is good ! No convicted monopolists here !).

And it all works - wireless, hibernate - everything, it just works - like Windows used to before Microsoft sold out to Hollywood and made it slow to copy files and turned down the network speed when playing music.
I was already using FireFox and Thunderbird, even on Windows, so it's not that big a leap to using them under Linux too.
Eclipse runs like a dream too, and once Citrix sort out a VPN client for modern Linux kernels I wont need VMWare to run a virtualized XP install either, hurrah !

I've even been able to copy my data of the Windows partition too, then resize that down to make a bit more room to copy more off. Rinse and repeat for a few more weeks and I can move Kubuntu to it's rightful home of /dev/hda1 :-)

Rar.