Ubuntu switch for 64 bit laptop

[Goondrious]

Good morning all of you fine and prestigious Ubuntu forum users,

I'm completely new to forums in general, so forgive me if my forum etiquette is sub-par.

I'm in second year university and my grandparents bought me a laptop to help me out. It's a 64 bit HP Pavilion dv7 with windows vista pre-installed on it. I've been using it for a year and it's running alright, minus the generic problems with vista. I'd like to try out a new OS just to test the waters and I remembered Linux and Ubuntu being pretty top notch, so I was wondering whether or not it's even possible to get a new OS on this computer, let alone Ubuntu. Thanks in advance for your time.

Sincurly,

Dah Goon

[stlsaint]

downoad the livecd of whatever linux distro you want. See DistroWatch (http://distrowatch.com/)for list of distros. you can download the livecd and boot to it to test ubuntu just to as you put it "test the waters" with absolutely no effects to your system...it wont install anything at all and you can boot right back into vista like nothing happened. also you can do something called a wubi install which will install ubuntu "inside" of windows. its not to be confused with a dual boot! post to learn more!

Welcome to Ubuntu/Linux

[Saghaulor]

To answer your question, it is entirely possible to put a different OS on your computer, unless there is some sort of firmware that constantly rewrites the disk. I find that hard to believe.

A live cd is a great idea. It lets you get your feet wet. It is not entirely safe however, because if you were to mount your hard drive, you can write to the disc. I write to the hard drive all the time while using live cds. So be careful when mounting your hard drive because you could accidently erase files that may be mission critical.

If you are interested in giving Linux a more permanent home on your computer, ie, installing it, I would recommend doing a dual boot configuration, so that if you need Windows, you can go back to it. I tried doing a Wubi install, and I wasn't very happy with it. It seemed very slow. Personally, I would do a dual boot. It's not very difficult and there is a plethora of documentation instructing on how to do it. I would also recommend using Ubuntu as it has an extensive user/forums community as well as being very good about working with most hardware. I like Ubuntu because for the most part, it just works.