Well, it is, very often. Excuse my french, but I'm frustrated with the netbook we got for our daughter right now. I updated the sucker to the latest SP when we got it at Christmas, but the girl has simply not gotten used to doing anything with it because it's too slow and funky. She wanted Vista, though, and my wife was against using Linux because she thought the girl'd have difficulty and be lost when trying to interface with a M$oft-centric world.

So, long story short, I set out to downgrade the beast to XP, 'cause then she'd have M$ AND a more responsive (albeit older) OS. I squeezed the partition down with Knoppix, booting from my flash drive, set up a new partition for XP with FAT32, and booted from the XP install CD on a portable CD/DVD drive. So far, so good, but then it's time to deal with the new hardware and an old OS - and sure enough, there was trouble. I couldn't get either a floppy-copy (USB drive again!) of the SATA driver or a slip-streamed (custom) XP install disk to work, nor does Knoppix have all the drivers it needs, for that matter.

So now it's either switch to debian and deal with all that entails, or get Win7 ($79.50 at WalMart or take a chance on a torrent-version), or some other netbook-centric distro, or ??? And it should be soon, 'cause Vista won't boot right any more. Anybody got a suggestion?

Krishna