Finally back online! the past month has been crazy hectic, what with me moving into my own apartment, getting my basic furniture, appliances set up and finally getting my new laptop and internet connected, I have barely had time to breathe. (phew!)
Now, however, since most of the hard work is out of the way, I can get down to relaxing in my own place and setting up my things exactly how I want :).
The thing that I have been spending most of my time over the past couple of days has been the comp (naturally). I have been setting up a dual boot system that uses the pre installed Windows Vista and Linux flavour of the month, ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. (This post incidentally, has been made using Firefox 3 running on Ubuntu).
Installing Ubuntu was a breeze and this is the first time that I have installed a version of Linux and not had any (major) issues with drivers. It recognised and correctly configured most of them right out of the box (the open source ones), and its easy installer found non open source ones like for my Nvidia graphics card. I am still getting the comp set up the way I like, tweaking things here and there, but I must say that so far Ubuntu has not disappointed.
There are a LOT of sites out there with easy to follow information on how to do almost anything in Ubuntu, starting off with the Ubuntu Team Wiki. Oh well, enough of a break, back to setting up 
