Operating Systems

I bought a laptop a few weeks ago and it just can't seem to behave itself. It came with all the spec *supposedly* needed to run Vista smoothly but it just kept packing up whenever I wanted it to do something, so I had to disable all the whizzy effects to have a stable system. I can't run my games (even in compatibility mode) or some of my older educational software. I'm thinking of using VirtualPC to install XP on a partition of the HDD to see if I can find a workaround. I can't just install XP over Vista because I don't trust the 'XP drivers' available online.

The laptop is OK to run anything made by Microsoft (anti-trust, anyone?) but forget about any other software, seriously.

Is it my imagination or was there virtually no point to Vista at all? The only thing I've been able to do with it is to rescue data from a pupil's memory stick.

Continuing my rant, I think Microsoft have stopped even pretending to give a damn about their customers (I always knew they didn't but now they don't even hide it anymore) - Service Pack 1 is out for developers only and not the rest of us. It stinks.

Need some advice about setting up Linux - made a CD image of Ubuntu but can't get it working... what do I need to do?

And how do I make a LiveCD?

I have a rediculous ammount of harddrives attached to my PC. I also have two on the laptop.
The PC is currently running windows 7(Brilliant OS) and XP(Also brilliant), and vista on the laptop. My question is: Is it possible to have three on one computerr? I know that might sounds dumb, but peopleon ever talk about dual boot. Im going to be, hopefully, putting leopard on my PC. Just as an alternative, and the fact i really love Leopard. I know how to do it, but i dont want to start anything that just isnt possible.

Cheers my technologically advanced friends(Aliens)

Snow Leopard. Quicker generally than Leopard but it killed my installation of Flash MX 2004.