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Well aren't you just a bundle of joy?

Never seen one

Lucky you, they're god awful.
Though I think its hilarious that Microsoft have actually copied the style recently. I don't know whether to give them credit for it - kind of - taking the piss out of the mac ones or not. I don't know if that was the intention or whether they simply copied them (again) in a vain attempt (again) to get more sales.

Do not get me started on Xbox fanboys. Really. Don't.

Yup, it does a pretty good job

Yeah I've heard good things about 7 which is nice to hear.
I mean come on, Vista was a joke and there's no denying it. Reading some of the ways die-hard fanboys try to defend it is pretty funny. The only decent thing they can come up with is:
"Its pretty" - which is true, but not a good enough excuse.

Man I hate fanboys (of all OS's, Mac fanboys are just as damn retarded if not slightly less ignorant than Windows fanboys) they're so freakin' pathetic.

Thats kind of... shockingly bad.


Anyway, as far as faking Aero, the closest I think you can physically get would be:


Thats actually XP.

The window in the foreground is a replacement for explorer. However I don't use it, as although the titlebar looks like 7/vista - fully transparent (but no blur) - it lacks functionality, and even I'm not gonna use something that is barely of any use. They still did a good job though.
Background window is the native explorer (which I seem to have accidentally altered my toolbar on but can't be bothered to boot back into XP to fix it.)

I don't like Windows Sidebar, but it does actually have it.

The 'taskbar' or whatever they're calling it these days works like the one in 7; with the fade and grouped windows that you can select from hover or whatever.

Startbar is, as you can see, fully functional.

Easy stuff; mouse, sounds, boot & login screen

Oh, and it hasn't glitched; my mouse just happened to be over the maximise button...

The guys that made all of those little bits of software did a really good job, kudos to them, and thanks of course.

Good luck dude. My college is getting 7 at christmas. So am I, they freaking owe me so they said they'd get a license for me. Lawl.

Ooo thats new. Hmph... Honestly don't know.
When you say menu, do mean you go straight to install from the boot menu, or do you boot to the LiveCD first? If you try to just install, I'd try to boot to the desktop. If something goes wrong there it might give you a more detailed error message as to exactly what went wrong. If it happens to boot all the way, double click the installer on the desktop and try it that way. I highly doubt it will work but theres no harm in trying.

Yup I know it can't. Shared partition is in NTFS. I didn't know that the 1st time though. That was fun!

I really, really don't mean to insult your intelligence - but you burnt it as a bootable ISO and not just data, right?

Bleh, perhaps something can be 'too basic.' I can't vouch for any of them so I probably shouldn't pass an opinion, but I think those are a little extreme and would probably do the opposite of entice you to use them.
Having said that, my very first go at Linux was with Knoppix on a LiveCD. I can't say much about it since I didn't know what the hell I was doing back then, but it seemed ok to me. I *think* it used KDE?

I know ZA said don't install it yet - for a very valid reason. I will be using that release as a reason to finally wipe that desktop and starting from scratch. However, its only 700MB and its so easy to install and then re-install over later. Mint makes it even easier, and all the *buntu distros are pretty damn similar aside from the DE. Its probably the best place to start, just don't fine-tune it to exactly how you like it.

Oooo I like the sound of that Chakra. I will admit that I've been slightly swaying towards KDE over Gnome, but it does what I want it to do I guess.

Hahaha, thanks sabre.
Yeah, these are the halloween avatars! xD

Public transport sucks here too matey, you're not alone.

Erm... On topic... right...

FAT32 is terrible isn't it? Isn't that the one where files cant be over like, 2gb? Everything I have is either NTFS or "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", which I know nothing about but it seems to do fine. Hard drives aren't my forté

My laptop triboots OS X, Windows XP (soon to be 7 when my college gets it) and Ubuntu.
Desktop machine is just Ubuntu (fileserver, proxy server etc etc)
And I love it.

Not ran into any issues with it on my laptop; all drivers working (even the webcam and keyboard lights!,) games run through Wine pretty darn nicely too; Eve @ 80FPS, everything high but with HDR OFF is puuurty damn fine by my standards. Though that was just a test, as Windows is what I use games for. And only games I might add; I can't stand the fail.

As far as aesthetics go, people seem to think that Linux = ugly, 98-like or completely text based. Really, REALLY untrue. If you're like me and you like shiny stuff and don't give a toss about your resource usage, install compiz and emerald. I'm sure you've seen the youtube videos on compiz. If not, do it. Any Linux distro is 100% customisable. Any colours, shapes, whatever - you can have it.
Infact, my aunt kept blowing her XP install up, so I put Ubuntu on it, made it look like XP (you can't actually tell the difference, theres even a start menu clone in the repositories) and she hasn't said a word aside from 'its so fast and I can't believe it hasn't broken again yet.' At least I won't be hearing from her again.

My desktop has a few issues with Ubuntu. It was hard to get ALSA (sound driver) working with my chipset and it hates USB headsets to this day. It also freaks if you pull the mouse out and should I have to do a hard reset it gets grub (boot loader) errors and often cannot see the hard drive. Though that isn't actually Ubuntu's fault; its some funky hardware thing since it isn't even picked up in BIOS.
It freezes now and then, which blows since then I have to hard reset... but thats guaranteed to be my fault as the installation is old and has been messed with to hell since its my 'test subject.'
I should probably start again and leave it nice and clean this time... Only issue is I don't have a spare 500gb hard drive to copy all my junk over to... *sigh*
ANYWAY, rambling there; bottom line is, none of those problems are apparent on my laptop as I haven't gone and screwed with a buttload of system files like I have on the desktop.

I highly recommend Ubuntu for newbies. Hell, I still use it now and I've been on Linux for what, 3 years now?
Arch is also pretty good. I briefly tried Gentoo but I think that hard drive (literally) exploded.

Ubuntu is pretty much all GUI based. However, certain tasks will probably need the terminal (command prompt.)
Grit your teeth and bare it. It isn't often required, and unless you're fixing something that went very wrong - it isn't complicated. 90% of the time that you would need to open the terminal is to open an 'explorer' window with root privileges so that you can screw with your system stuff like sound schemes and themes etc. "gksudo nautilus" isn't hard to remember is it?
Hell, if you're anything like me once you get the hang of it you'll do 90% of tasks in the terminal anyway - but its important to know that it isn't necessary.

Ubuntu - Linux for human beings is their slogan for a reason; its easier than Windows in most cases, 'cause it doesn't scream at you; "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG, I'M GONNA DIE NOW!"

People always wave their e-dicks around with OSs and I don't know why; Windows vs OS X is the most obvious one.
People that use Linux do the exact same thing with the distros despite it being the same damn OS at heart. Its this generation's nature I guess; being a trolling retard.
Ubuntu is often criticised for 'being nooby' (actual quote.) True I guess, it really is usable for people that are 100% used to Windows - but where's the problem with that since it does what it does very well, and I haven't seen anything that another distro can do that it can't? Save for Redhat.

Oi, don't you dare complain about your petrol prices.
Its £1.04+ a litre here right now and its done nothing but go up aside from about 3 weeks where it dropped to £0.90 again but has now regained that diabolical figure.
Thats $1.70 a litre. Bastard.

And yeah, you must have some pretty valuable stuff to blow a grand on a hard drive. I'd cut my losses.

A thousand dollars for data recovery? What the *Ammo* man where do these people get off?

Did you like, know it was gonna cost that before hand or did they tell you AFTER they did it so that you didn't have a choice?

Wow, you learn something new every day!

If I ever get models into bz2 again I guess I'll mess around with getting it via obj instead of 3ds then.