hi
i have a newish computer with windows and dont want to do a duel boot, theres a couple more options like a seperate HD or a refurbished second hand pc

the last option is the prefered one and one that i had chosen some time ago, do you know what the minimum requirements are for installing mandriva

things like minimum RAM and HD space

any imput appreciated

Welcome to LQ.

Dual booting is totally painless, and Mandriva sets it up for you easily. If you do not want to share the space on your windows drive, just slot in another (It'll probably be referred to as /dev/hdb ). Be careful at the partitioning stage - this is when you can accidentally wipe your treasured files so it's always best to make a backup of your DATA files, as you can always reinstall software.

Other wise, system requirements are simple:

The more RAM the better: 64M will be difficult (things like KDE will crawl) 256M good, 512 M better, 1G even nicer. Unlike windows, Linux makes good use of all available RAM.
On your HDD, you'll need about 2-4GB for your / (root) filesystem (depends on how much clutter you want to install - Do you want Gnome and KDE? - Probably the answer is Yes as you'll want to try them both out), and the size of your /home will depend on what personal files you want to keep there.
It is always nice to have an NVIDIA video card, as they have good drivers for linux.

Hope this helps.

thankyou for the reply, there is so much to read in this newbie forum, even things that dont concern me are interesting to read, and you learn summat new ever other second here,

Glad you are finding your way around this site: soon you'll find the most excellent "Search" button on this page, that, and posting error messages into Google solves many problems.

Writing down what you did to fix things, or exactly what you did to install some software helps a lot when you come to reinstall (I had to 3 times when I first started with linux - I made loads of stupid mistakes, and sometimes it was easier just to start over from scratch), or meet a similar problem again.

The best way to learn linux is jump in and install a distro. You can see I like Mandriva, but of course others will swear by their favourites. In the beginning it is nice to have windows to fall back on, but as you get used to the security and stability of linux, you'll use it more & more: The first sign that things are going in the right direction is that you'll want to find out how to change the default boot OS from windows to linux. I still have Win98, but haven't used it in a year or more, so I do not think I'll ever be going back.

Have fun.