My Dell Vostro 1000 crapped out on me a week ago after improperly shutting 
down. I had stopped using it as much because it was very slow after years 
of Windows Vista updates and other software updates. It would take almost 
5 minutes to boot, making it a pain to use at job sites, especially when a 
reboot was needed.

So, having not used the laptop in some time, there was nothing on it that 
I would miss, I think. I installed Ubuntu 11.10 yesterday. The laptop 
loads and runs much faster now. Ubuntu is a bit flaky on some things; but, 
I'll learn to deal with it. 

I've been wanting to make the move for some time. I suppose I just needed 
an excuse. In any case, despite all the visual goodness of modern Linux 
distributions, I find the command line features more appealing.