Ok so I've tried 5 versions of windows all of which crash quite a bit no matter how much you mess with them. And dang it I liked linux a heck of a lot when I was able to use it. I have a set of SuSE cd's here but the trouble is that suse-blinux no longer detects my braille display (had to get a new one recently because I needed a portable braille display.) so I cannot install that on this machine. I have a braille lite 40 here now. I don't really think it matters to me which linux I decide to use. Got some questions though. I've got a 45 GB hd sitting in this box with an athlon 4 chip and 768 mb of ram. How should I partition my drive for linux? What would be the easiest distro to hack a boot disk for so that I can install without sighted help as I don't trust a lot of people with my computer and most of the people I know would faint if they had to install anything other than windows so it looks like I'll be doing it myself. Also is there a way to read ms word and excel documents under linux? I get a lot of those and it seems saving things as plain text is a foreign concept to a lot of people. I assume that I would have to sacrifice ocr for a reliable operating system. By that I mean that there is ocr for windows but the os crashes too often and I am forever reinstalling but I've treid to put up with it because I haven't been able to get a dual boot to work at all. All that seems to happen when I try to dual boot si windows becomes twice as unstable. So am I correct that there is no useable ocr for linux? Any comments/suggestions/advice/whatever would be greatly appreciated at this point as I'm going to slowly go insane and I've got a huge programming project I've gotta get started on (studying computer science in college) and I need to use my computer for a lot of other things and I really can't afford to waste a lot of time and torture myself with instability. The lack of ocr is probably going to hurt but I suppose that I can figure something out. I should also point out taht I have a fast internet connecdtion and a cd burner and half a dozen different linux iso's sitting on my drive. Oh, almost forgot, I don't have a hardware synth. If you need more details about my setup you can always ask. Thanks for taking the time to read this and not pressing the delete button already. :) I will quit before I cause more trouble here and I will go back to insanity for a bit before I freeze up again.