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Hello: I'm a musician and graphic design artist. I use programs like photoshop, freehand, dreamweaver, maya,etc. Also i use reason, cubase and recently protools. I also play games like the sims2, black and white 2, age of empires, etc, etc, etc. I just bought a laptop. 1.83 Ghz, Intel Core2 Duo t5600, 2GB of ram and 160 Gb of hard-drive. I made myself some 100 GB external drives too to carry different contents. What made me buy it is the Nvidia Geforce go 7300 256mb graphic card, since i like to play alot and many laptops don't run new games. But the really bad thing was that it carried Vista Home Premium. I've always worked on windows systems and recently XP SP2 was fine for my needs. But this new Vista made me totally frustrated. A lot of my sofware didn't work with it, it made it crash or have very horrible configuration problems (like a constant blue screen "of death"). So i wanted to go back to XP but it was worse. There where no drivers for my computer at toshiba that fit xp. So i went to find them at the manufactures web pages. But i had no luck either for most gadgets and even the nvidia card (since it's kinda new). So i recovered the system to Vista, but again, soooo many problems and i feel i don't have anykind of control over my computer. I spent my money and i think it was a very bad buy. But even if i bought any other laptop right now, they all come with vista and i fear i will have the same problem alll over again. So i'm really convinced i need to change my OS. I've heard about Linux, Ubuntu and OS like that. People that go into those are really convinced about the benefits as i've heard. But i'm a total ignorant about them and i'd really want something that works with what i do and like to do. To make this not as long as my frustration is. Would Linux or these OS make my life better? If i install linux: -Will it work in my computer? -Will laptop gadgets work (integrated camera, finger print recognition, wi-fi, bluetooth, etc)? -Will that Nvida card and the hd audio work? -Can the applications and games i use be compatible? -Will my external devices such as an audio/midi interface i own work? i'm dowloading Ubuntu right now, but before i install anything i would like to know a bit more. I've really lost alot of time with this problems. I'll really appreciate any kind of help.

1.no problem 2,3 and 5.if you use ubuntu 7.04,your devices will work better.if you use other linux edition,you may download the device drivers from the Internet.(I suggest you using the ubuntu 7.04) 4.if you want to use the programs that you mentioned,you should use wine. wine is a program that let you run the programs that you mentioned. but there are many programs in linux that can instead of the programs that you mentioned.