Well, Linux Mint installed just Minty once I figured out my partitions. In the true Linux spirit of things, I will share the steps to my personal success:

1. In Windows, go into Manage.. Disk Management. Clear Linux partitions.

2. Unplug hard drive with important stuff. Leave only OS drive plugged in!

3. Burn Linux Mint Live CD. Burn GPartEd Live CD.

4. Change BIOS to boot from CD before HDD.

5. Boot into GPartEd Live CD.

6. Create Linux Partitions. I made 8GB for root, 5GB for profile (for sharing Firefox and Thunderbird between XP and Mint), 8GB for swap, and the rest for home. That's without touching my XP partition, of course!

7. Reboot into XP to confirm it's still happy. Yay!

8. Reboot into Mint Live CD. Click Install. Under Paritions, select Manual and then tell it which partitions to use for what. Easy!



Mint actually automagically detected XP and added it to the GRUB menu. How cool is that!

Everything worked for me out of the box, including sound and video. In fact, the native resolution of Mint is 1680x1050, so I was happy happy! On first restart, I went into Appearance and turned on Extra effects. Linux told me I had to download proprietary drivers. I selected .173 from the list and restarted and bam! All effects worked!

Whew! Now back to work tomorrow!

After much fussing and loss of hair and sanity to my video encoding habits, I finally bit the bullet and bought a quad core processor. I read the reviews and balanced the numbers, and I stood to gain about 50% of my time back, so at $230 it was worth the sacrifice.

I must say I heart this chip. Quad is SO much more uber than dual. :)