I think this is unique.

I had 11.04 installed on a 500GB HDD dual-booting w/Win7 64bit Ultimate. 11.04 was an upgrade from 9.04/9.10/10.04/10.06

A week or so ago, I started having wierd issues with the power connector on my 500GB drive. Sometimes it would spin up, sometimes not (The power connector/circuitry was going bad on the HDD. If I fiddled with it enough, it would boot). So I ordered a new one from Newegg.com, destined to get here on a Wednesday.

Wednesday came, as did my new drive. I created a 11.04 LiveUSB, and installed a fresh copy of 11.04 on the new drive (Nvidia graphics, wired 10/100 ethernet, builtin HD sound chip). All went well, and installed the proprietary drivers for my 9600GSO. Booted into 'Ubuntu Classic', and no issues at all.

So, I happily started to copy over the 'must have' stuff from the failing drive to the new drive (30+GB of World of Warcraft, folders of other saved stuff, iso's, etc). About 1/4 of the way through, the drive ground to a halt. Literally. My old drive failed in a groaning, skin-crawling tone, and that was that.

Well, not only did I lose all that data, it also drove the new drive bonkers, and lost all of that, too...

So, back to the thumb drive, reinstalled 11.04, installed new Nvidia drivers, booted into 'Ubuntu Classic', plugged in my wireless stick, and...

Well, this is the part that is RARELY EVER HEARD IN THESE FORUMS:

It worked.

Everything.

No issues.

And, best of all, no Windows.

Gotta love it. Except the 'irreplaceable' data being gone, that is.

So, to summarize:

No issues. It works. 11.04 64bit, 10/100 ethernet (nvidia), NV 9600GSO, wireless cheap USB thumb stick from Walmart, all networking, video, cooling, sleep, hibernate, keyboard, mouse, Blackberry (after installing the Barry stuff), audio (even a Logitech USB Chat headphones), EVERYTHING.

It just WORKS. After a 10 minute install of the OS, and a 5 min session of Googling about my Blackberry.

Done.

I love Linux.

Now, for the weekend long install/patches/downloads for World of Warcraft...sigh...