Not a genius, not sure who called you that without knowing you personally, but a whiz compared to me for sure! Don't get me wrong, I could dump Windows and survive, but myself and the wife need Explorer and Office programs, among other things that I'm just not willing to give up, nor run under Wine, which to me is just plain silly.

why do you need office or internet explorer?

I think the main reason that my xp partion filled up, was because of all the temp files created when doing extensive video and sound editing. Now I know you can make the temp folder on another partion but this drastically kills your performance. I use roughly 5 big programs that do this.

Cheer for your idea's Im getting the cd n all so I can experienment with different combinations before I start the mamouth task of putting my old computers files onto my new machine. lol. (im thinking of taking the old HDD and directly pluging it into the new computer to avoid the three or so hours + of network moving lol)

Hello again.

Ok im on my new computer now, very mean lol.

Um i installed Mandravia, but I think I screwed it up, there was this part of install under the "updates" part, with a huge list of things to tick, I ticked them all but then it said 14 hours to install so I cancelled that.

I got into Mandrivia but I couldnt seem to change my resolution so I could actually work on it. So firstly how do you do that, everything is so huge that on most windows I cant even see the bottom to click "ok"

No panic, that should be easy to solve. Did you install KDE or Gnome? Or both?

Well Vista had a mean patty, so I formatted my HDD again.

Im yet to reinstall Mandrivia. Ill try and install both KDE and GNOME, but is there away to avoid the huge list of things to install that I dont understand? Like a way were it will pick the best for me. Um what interface (KDE/GNOME) would you reconmend me to learn on?

As far as I remember, you can just accept the default during setup. This may mean that you don't get everything that you like installed at once but it's really easy to add it later. In fact, once a distro has been out for a month or so, I do not recommend installing too much. Packages get updated so fast that most of what you installed will immediately be replaced with an update.

Gnome, KDE, it's a matter of personal taste. KDE is said to be more windows like but I prefer Gnome because its menus are less cluttered. Also, I find that it makes it easier to understand how a Linux system is organized. Mandriva has made its KDE a beauty, though, so you may still want to install it, if only to admire it LOL. Anyway, you can install both if you want to, I always did until I finally made up my mind. It's just a few hundred megabytes extra.

As for your resolution issue, that can be solved in either of two ways.
1. install the proprietary nvidia driver once you've got your system running - this is the easier solution.
2. edit a file called xorg.conf that specifies resolution (among many other things). Not difficult but a bit more work than just checking off a few boxes. I remember one case where I was pretty much forced to follow this approach because my windows were so blown up that I couldn't get at the "OK" button to confirm that I really wanted to install the nvidia driver. Oh the irony. : P

Yeah thats the problems I was having lol couldn see the ok.

Ok ill try to intall Mandrivia again now, and go and download the driver of the net.

You don't need to download the driver, it will be available from the "Add/Remove Software " menu. If you're lucky, you can get it to install without opening any windows (other than the terminal that is):
Launch a terminal (Go to Applications > Tools > Terminal)
Type su - and your root password
Type urpmi dkms-nvidia-current
Type exit twice to close the terminal
Log out and back in

Grr sorry guys, Vista has completely killed my computer 3 times now. Corrupting the entire hdd each time. Ill try the above when I get the thing stable lol. (well as close as I can with windows)