This is PartitianMagic from Norton. This nifty program helps you to slice and dice your hard drive, for when you want to do stuff like load up a Linux operating system on your machine. 
This is Ubuntu, a Linux operating system being sold on new Dell's. It comes with it's own word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation suite, and it's completely free. Seems like a fun thing to try. However, it's not as easy as that.
First, I ran PartitianMagic to carve out a cozy home on my hard drive for Ubuntu. Then I loaded up all the files, and used PartitianMagic to redirect my boot.ini file to look at the Ubuntu drive for all the files it needed to load when it started up. I rebooted and then...nothing.
I didn't load the Ubuntu files properly, in part because I'm a novice and in part because the community generated user manual are written by techies with no consideration for what non-technical readers might actually find useful. I consider myself advanced enough to at least attempt Linux, but still, it'd be good to generate consumer focused manuals to ease the switching process for newbies. Apple comes to mind as a good example of easing the transition.
Anyhoo, everything I threw at my laptop failed to bring it back from the dead. Further, I didn't have a Windows XP disc to reload the operating system, because Dell doesn't give you a Windows disc. Lame. After a day of frantic searching for a solution with a looming homework deadline, I ended up buying this:
So now I'm the proud owner of Vista, thanks to my failed attempt to upload Linux. Not exactly what I envisioned, but at least my computer boots up.
