Thanks to all who offered advice about our choice of a new PC and new distro. The AMD64-3000+ powered beast is up and running Ubuntu. Very slick installation except for the challenge of getting the nvidia driver up and then getting her ancient ViewSonic 17G recognised as capable of more than 60 Hz at 1024 x 768. (Challenge overcome, and I swear I'm going to learn vi BEFORE the next time I stuff up an X11 configuration file and then can't get to gedit to repair it!)
OpenOffice boots up in what seems like less than a second, and she-who-must-be-obeyed is impressed. The only catch was that all her documents, which I had dutifully transferred across the network and burnt to CD-RW via xcdroast, were owned by "500" with no read permissions for her. I had to copy them to her HD as root and then repermission each subdirectory and file. Is that standard operating procedure when your backup is a CD-RW? =====Andrew
