I have wanted to leave Windoze behind for so long! Every now and then, I'd visit the Mandrake and Redhat websites and hover over the downlaod links for the latest version, but only bothered once, backed the three disk set up to CD-r's and forgot about them.

Until I had to use them to recover my knackered WinXP installation a few weeks ago.

I couldn't find my XP install disk, so had to install Linux in order to access the hard drive and rip the disk image I keep there.

So I did a bit of research, made sure I knew how to get the modem working, made sure I had all the files I was likely to need if I ran into problems, and decided "to hell with it".

We're two days in things are going fine. Did have some teething troubles with the modem, but that was easily sorted out with a little application of common sense.

And I got QUAKE working today! Ages ago, I found a copy of Quake 3 Arena for Linux and decided to pick it up. Never even looked at it since until I needed the CD key last year. Since then I've mistaken it for the Windoze version dozens of times, so I decided to see how it went. The in-game graphics are still not working, but the menus work and that's a good start.

Suck on that Bill Gates!