I am currently using a laptop that is set up with XP and Ubuntu in dual boot. I have a 30 GB partion first for xp, then a 20GB ext3 partition for Ubuntu, and then a 20GB swap partition also for Ubuntu. I loaded XP first and then used GRUB in Ubuntu as the dual boot loader. It all went without a hitch. I currently use NTFS3g to read and write to my NTFS partition while in Linux. It works great. Ubuntu is a bit finicky about graphics cards. It would not load out of the box on to two of my desktops. One of them has a Nvidia 8800 card and the other has an ATI 9200 graphics card. I did the research on the issue with the Nvidia card and found the correct drivers and instructions for correcting the problem, so it’s not impossible to fix, even for a Linux beginner.