I had a great experience two weekends ago, and haven't had a chance to relate it to anyone, yet.

A close friend had "lost" a hard drive.  Windows XP Pro install disk would only continuously crash on the install.  So, it only makes sense, the drive must be damaged, right?  Not so fast...

So I bring live CD and USB live, and the PC is a bit too old, USB boot not available.  Still, the Live CD saves the day.  After seeing the hard drive was alive, and backing up the critical data to his external drive, something he hadn't quite gotten to in the last 2 weeks, my bud asked me if I could install Linux without destroying the Windows data. 

Voila, less than 20 minutes later he had a working system.  Less than another 1/2 hour, and him and the wife were oohing, ahhhing, and generally laughing at the Compiz desktop.  I also showed them that although fun, it had a very practical side.  The only drawback was his printer.  A dinosaur HP, and the HP drivers weren't fitting it.  Draft quality was great, but his printer was capable of so much more, but not after the basic install.  Still, the highlight of the day was the video recorder, which worked flawlessly as soon as we plugged it in.  His wife just wondered aloud "Why didn't it just work like that in Windows?"  Good question. 

In Linux, we merely opened the folders, then opened the video editor software, and moved stuff into our timeline and made a quick movie.  Previews of all the videos were right there, in the file viewer.

I left, fairly certain he would be installing another HD, reinstalling Windows, and slightly wondering about Linux fom that point forward.  I was very surprised after a week, running into him and finding he's still running his desktop on Linux.  His words "after all, it's running great, and I can't make up my mind as to why I need to spend more money to get a working PC working differently (on Windows)" 

Wow, Linux...