I just got a despatch Notification from Amazon that my Windows 7 Home Premium is in the Royal Mail... so I'll maybe get it tomorrow, but probably next week if the strike goes ahead.

Our supplier insight.com/uk which had 'free' plastered all over their site when making the purchase I had this issue. After purchase I decided to look at the 'free' upgrade path. After being redirected to HP then a 3rd party website I was required to enter the serial numbers of the units. Only after this verification was I told it was a cost of £21.99 per license for postage/packaging and handing etc etc (no economies of scale for the 3 I wanted). at no point in the T&Cs does it mention the actual price that will have to be paid (only Insight displayed the upgrade as 'free') they say there are charges but does not state what they are. So how was I supposed to know what a reasonable charge was for these âoefreeâ upgrades without 1st having to order the items, take delivery of them and then unpack them? It therefore seems logical that their Terms and Conditions should go beyond the stating there may be costs and be a little more forthcoming about the actual charges. Insight are happy to mislead buyers with the words âoefreeâ. Iâ(TM)m interested to know what amazing courier service is being employed and what shiny gold plated box the copy of the software will come in since it requires £21.99 to post and package a DVD, this leads me to believe that the whole £21.99 is not the incidental P&P charges and that someone if making a little profit from this supposed âoefreeâ upgrade. Surely I can forgo a large part of this cost by downloading an ISO from them and them e-mailing me the CD keys...? strangely not an option... So it seems it's a rather cunning practice which, no doubt, is designed to mislead.

I had those sort of grub probelms prior to Hardy Heron Hardy Heron (8.04) now comes with the Wubi installer, thus negating the usual problems with grub and HDD configurations. For the casual or interested user Wubi allows for a simple hassle free alternative installation that simply allows for Ubuntu to install to a folder structure within the existing Windows NTFS file structure. So no free disks or partition required prior to install, just free disk space required within the NTFS partition. Allowing a simple dual boot option via the Windows boot loader (adding a line to the boot.ini to then call grub). It's not the ideal setup, but it works and avoids a lot of the initial setup problems that would detract the casually interested Windows out there. Once people have tried this setup and decided they like what they see (like me) and they've got to grips with some of the nuances of Linux and Ubuntu then they can look at 'proper' installation as the permanent solution. Another part of the Ubuntu success also lies is the forums and support you can get. The learning curve is not as sharp or steep as it used to be. I spend 95% of my time within the Ubuntu Heron environment now and completely love it. I just need to wait for the solutions that require dependency on MS and I'll been gone for good. Most shockingly - I'm a Windows XP/NT/2003 Sys admin and M$ is what I support daily. I'm confident enough now with Ubuntu to how start recommending it to friends and will be installing it on my mother home PC soon.