Recently my workstation died a quiet death and I suddenly was without a computer at home. Well, glad as I am, it was not that suddenly at all, because I knew there was something wrong with either the mainboard or the power supply. I had some backups on an external storage and therefore there was not too much data loss to fear. Weeks ago I bought a new PC for about 500 Euros willing to work hard for me.
Well but you're a geek or something and you know, a Windows OS very much depends on your hardware and most likely no Windows backup will run on different hardware.
My approach of getting this PC running as quickly as possible and getting rid of the hardware compatibility issues was to set up a Linux hosting a virtual machine (no matter what brand, at least it should be at no cost) and equip that VM with my old Windows OS.
The lesson was painful and perhaps you prefer reading this article instead of doing the same mistake I did. I'm glad I had the experience, but finally was kicking all of it out of the window and went the good old Windows way.
The new hardware differs from the old one in several aspects, but the most imporant two are:
As a Linux OS I decided to use Ubuntu as that's a very simple distribution. It's based on Debian and thus should have a really good maintained kernel. Inserting the DVD it was unable to boot. Incompatible to IP30, although that mainboard is out for a half year now. Well okay, lets try another Linux... maybe, how about the latest Debian? I burned such a DVD and ... guess what: unable to handle the disks, too. This actually started to be a nightmare. During a couple of days I tried to install x86 (32 bit) and x64 (64 bit) versions of Ubuntu, Debian Etch, Debian Etch with new SATA drivers, Debian Etch and a half (that's a kind of latest RC of Debian) and Knoppix Linux.
The "Debian Etch and a half" then really was able to boot and install. All seemed to head for happy end. By the way, what do you think about Linux and WLAN? Briefly, after another some days and a lot of failed attempt to make my Hama Wireless LAN PCI card usable under Linux, I gave up with Debian and went over to OpenSuSE.
Instruction for the reader: please continue reading the above paragraph once again, replacing "Debian" with "OpenSuSE" in mind. Then continue below.
Dear reader, I'm tired and would like to close this chapter. The conclusion is: if you're a Windows user, got a brand new PC and would like to try out Linux: just don't do it. Instead, use your old PC from last century for this and you've got your Linux up and running after just an hour or so.
In case you'd like to set up a machine that's state of the are with Linux, you better read through the release notes of the Linux packages and learn about compatibility issues before buying the hardware. There seem to be even some WiFi PCI cards that run with newer Linux kernels natively.