I am an 80-year-old British Linux Magazine subscriber living in France. I have a Medion 17” Laptop and still have XP on my system, but I now do most of my work in PCLinuxOS. I have tried many Linux systems in the past, with Mandriva being the most successful until recently, when I obtained an iso of PCLOS. The PCLinuxOS Live disc, which was the first Live disc to recognize my “speedtouch” modem and ADSL Wanadoo broadband immediately, put me straight on the web and ultimately found and used everything native to my laptop perfectly – even the built-in screencam and Epson DX3850 Printer/scanner.
I don’t ever use XP for the Internet now, only PCLOS. VirtualBox performs perfectly in PCLOS, and also I have installed my XP OS, which is running as a virtual system with the few Windows programs for which I have found no Linux alternatives. It will not be long before I delete the XP portion on the laptop altogether.