I have an old HP Pavillion 6465 PC and I decided to install Linux on it one day. After living in misery using Win XP on that machine for a server (blah), I finally had enough. Grabbed Redhat 9, installed with some apps, and everything went well. Except that damned network card (Linksys LNE100TX).
After a quick search via Yahoo, I found that Redhat actually had drivers installed by default (tulip). After editing a few config files, all was well. Compare that to Windoze where I searched for days in vain trying to get the drivers to work =^).

Best of all, I can get all the apps I need for a server without having to pay for an annoying trial version or whatever and shelling out $100 for something that I will forget about in a week. Now I have a great server (as well as an excellent Mandrake system on my laptop) and no worries about M$ checking up on me with hidden files ;^). My laptop works 50 times better without Windoze XP as well.
Dumping M$ never felt this great!

Kewl stonehurst, totally agreed with M$ checkups - just not wanted

Plus I bet ya u'll learn alot more now that u've made the switch... I did and now i'm even programming (k taken me a little while to learn but so eorth it and development tools are included with Linux distros lol)