A flash drive is as good a method as any for moving files.

However a bit of a rant.

Ubuntu 11 has been dumbed down so much to make it 'user friendly' that it is actually more difficult to use.

They seem to have dumped synaptic and you are left with the Ubuntu Software Center. Fair enough. Try and find anything, a struggle. Make sure you know how wild cards work and look for out of the way switches like "show techinical items"

This would replace one of my original screen shots.



Seriously, get a 2 GB flash drive and try some other distros, LinuxMint if you want ubuntu-ish and Gnome, maybe Mepis11 for debian and KDE, both have good and friendly forums for help.

I agree with Rich on Mint. I have been using it as my primary os for 2 years now. The support is incredible. I am running Ubuntu 11.10 with gnome shell installed on a flashdrive and the first thing I did was download synaptic. I prefer it over the software center. But Mint is an excellent choice for those switching from windows and the new release looks really nice.

Congrats on getting up and running on Linux, Molly. Once you get over the initial "it's not that way in Windows" feeling, you're gonna love it. Then, you'll wonder why they ever did it that way in Windows.

Not a big fan of Canonical and Ubuntu but one nice thing about Linux is that you have lots of choices.

Thanks Tux but I have heard many people say so many things about all the different flavors, it got very confusing. I heard wine was outstanding. Anyway, I am finally catching on to some of it. I don't know what canonical is but I guess it is just one more thing I have to look up besides Gnome I hear so much about.

Wine is a Windows emulator. I would never taint my Linux by installing a Windows emulator.

You have a dual boot system so if you need to run a Windows app, do it it Windows (jmo).

You can easily mount and access your Windows drive from Linux in order to share files.

Off Topic and apologies if you already know all this.
Just a note for any Windows users who might be thinking of trying out linux.

Best way is to try out some of the Linux Distributions (distros) before going flat out and installing one. This is important because not every distro might support your particular mix of computer hardware or you might just hate the 'look-&-feel'.

Most distros have a 'live' version, although that is not always the case. This comes in the form of an 'iso' file, ie a disk image. Modern computers generally will boot from a usb drive so there is no need to burn the iso to a CD/DVD. Quicker boot time and saves wear and tear on your DVD drive. No usb booting? There is even a way around this for older computers, the 'plop' boot disk.
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

Installing a distro iso to a usb drive is no longer difficult, there are utilities for this. One of the originals is 'unetbootin', there are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac. see:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Another resource for this is http://www.pendrivelinux.com There are alternatives there, mainly for windows. One of them YUMI I found to work quite well.

So if you have a spare hour, fire up a linux and see how it performs.