One other thing to keep in mind - you spent years learning the details of Windows. You will have to also spend some time learning Linux. Linux is not Windows, and does many things differently. You won't need to spend years learning everything, but you will need to spend some time and effort on it. And you will be well rewarded for your efforts. Just don't expect everything to be crystal clear immediately. Everything is done for good reasons, and in a logical way, but you have to learn the reasons and the logic. Or at least a little bit.

DSUB
79.2Hz - Out of range

Was the error message my monitor handed to me, everytime I've experienced this on Windows, a graphics driver has requested a configuration the monitor couldn't output or changed the refresh rate that the monitor could not handle. My monitor is 60Hz by default so perhaps Ubuntu tried to load a refresh rate that had not been configured....?? Should I have ran Terminal and configured a resolution so it was to be available once the driver had been installed..??

I couldn't find a solution around it so I had no other choice but to get the laptop out and configure USB install for Windows 7 and then boot it from my computer. All went well but strangely enough, upon starting Windows for the first time - I had NO drivers whatsoever. I obviously know my hardware and pretty much all the drivers I need but having no recognizable network adapter I had to painfully start downloading specific drivers from my laptop and transfer them to my PC but I've never had this issue before on clean install or rewrite.


I've read that a lot of people have issues with ATI and Linux and so they opt to stick with Nvidia since there Linux support is stronger so I'm led to believe.

More functionality and better documentation, I would guess. I'm not the best judge, having some but not a great deal of experience with Windows command line and batch files, but for me it was a struggle to find out how to do simple tasks in Windows command line, even with the help files.

For example, I needed to find WAV files under the current directory and convert them to MP3. I got it to work, but I thought the syntax was a bit tricky. I'm not quite sure the following is exactly right, but it worked:
In Bash, I think it could be written as:
Is it just a matter of familiarity, or is Bash easier to learn?

I think the only people who are proficient on the Windows command line are those who started out in DOS, which was entirely command-line driven, before Windows was debuted. I once knew my way around a Windows command line, but I abandoned it years ago, so I'm very much out of practice. But there really isn't all that much difference. The commands are slightly different, but all in all it's not a huge hurdle to go from one to the other. But you don't have to use the command line in either if you don't want to. There are GUIs for eveything. It's just that the command line is often much more efficient than opening a GUI. I use both, depending on what I'm doing and the context.

Bash is the 'standard' shell in Linux, so most scripts have been written to work with it.
Previously, they would have been written for 'sh', the original shell.
(Shell = Command Line program)