Distros and Desktops, almost OT

[Q]

On 18/05/13 18:54, Pete Wright wrote:
> I have a largish (389 gig) windows partition on this machine that has
> become essentially useless (all my data backed up elsewhere, I think,
> please Goddess) so should I just go ahead and try various distros on
> this machine and boot into whichever one I want to use/try at any given
> time?

Hi Pete

Just to address one small aspect, why not use a virtual machine to 
install other distros to play around with?

It would save the hassle of having to reboot to boot into a different OS 
and could just be deleted if you decided you didn't like it, plus it 
would obviate the need to wipe/amend the size of your Windows partition.

I have a friend who has about seven VMs -- several Linuxes of various 
flavours, Win7, Win8 and I think even a BSD.

When I had my machine built I had XP installed as well as Ubuntu. I 
can't remember when I last booted the XP partition -- I've had a WinXP 
VM for several years and it's handy and much more convenient to start 
that up for the rare instances that I need it rather than reboot the 
machine.

Q