dual booting windows & linux is hard, as windows likes to overwrite the MBR. i've tried it before, half heartedly, and never got it to work the way it's supposed to. i have made it work, through my BIOS, which supports booting from any of the four motherboard IDE Controllers, or by using a little program called "Smartboot" (look for it on sourceforge) which allows you to boot any drive/partition in your computer.
i say just use linux, i've had so much more fun (and frustration too, I guess) with linux on my computer. plus, there's that good feeling that you actually know how the computer is working for once...
