I know all the right people. You're sitting in a very fortunate place (lots of science in Boulder). Email me at noah (dot) bronstein (at) gmail (dot) com if you are serious about finding a spectrometer.

First you should figure out if for some odd reason running MS is mission critical (like "we absolutely must have MS Office"). Second, crunch the numbers and figure out just how much they could save by switching. If you're as right as you think you are, it will be a large number. Don't just give them a number though - figure out some health-care equipment or service that costs that much money. Then get some big-wigs in a room and tell them you're going to give them that health-care equipment/service for FREE. Or some such other audacious strategy.

except that your scientist likely has about 50 IQ points on your barber.

I had one avoidable issue during install that mostly related to my old OS (XP) locking the HD due to an improper reboot (my impatience). This caused the installer to try to repartition the HD, fail, and effectively delete all my data (but only after one partially successful reboot?). But overall, the performance of the new OS is far superior to XP, Vista, 7, and older versions of Ubuntu.