I have tried installing OS on vmware but it causes my PC to produce a lot of noise when I run 2 or more OS at the same time.

How can I learn linux then? I ever partition my harddisk and screwed the whole thing up.

Clean the dust off your cpu heat sink. Really! I have an old, trusty Pentium 4 PC which has served me well for many years. On occasion when running a high CPU task I would notice a lot of noise coming from the PC. Investigation showed that a lot of dust had built up on the heat sink fins. The CPU got hot and that caused the cooling fan to speed up and cause the noise. I blew the heat sink clean with compressed air and I had peace and quiet - until the dust built up again.

As far as running Linux as a dual boot, as a virtual machine or some other way...

Please let us know what hardware you have and what distro (brand, flavor etc.) of Linux you wish to run. I have run various distros of Linux on the old Pentium 4 machine as virtual machines with Win XP as the host operating system. Not real fast but OK to experiment and learn.

Talk to the forum. You will get the help you need.

Ken

Have you tried running top when this happens; it sounds like its swapping a lot.

Hi, what is running top?
I am using a netbook here so virtualisation is awfully slow.

As above, it depends on what kind of noise you hear.
It could be the fans as per post #2, or it could be that the amt of RAM you have is small for the amt required, so its swapping to disk (using the swap partition).

Please answer taylorkh's qns re HW and software you are using.

Running 'top' means going into the cmd line and running the 'top' cmd, which will show you what the system is doing, inc swap usage.