Again.. the intent of this post appears to aimed at a non-sys admin type user.. IE: newbie. A timid, "I don't want to lose my life's work", "if I touch this will it break?", user.

The best way to sell these people is offering them solutions where the risk of hurting their precious dataz is minimal - this is with a Virtual Machine of some sort.

WubI is fine, Bootable CD is also fine (but slow) - (geneven; how much software is available on those? The reason Knoppix/Kubuntu/etc run off the cd is they are compressed on the fly allowing for more software, in a smaller footprint.)

Piku - If you notice I wasn't the one that suggested anyone re-partition their Hard Drives; that was in the OP.. I actually made the comment that I was surprised the Kubuntu installer has made it to the point where they are comfortable enough with the (experimental) ntfs support in Linux to actually allow resizing of an ntfs drive.

Now I haven't looked into cygwin in quite some time.. but when I did - it was a downright pain; had to compile everything I wanted to run via source, it was slow (then), and difficult... If I want to convert a newbie; i'm not going to give them Slackware, Arch or Gentoo on a command line and say "OK - Go."

You want them to have an interface that they are somewhat familiar with - Best options are XFCE (my favorite), KDE, and Gnome. IceWM is ok, but configuration is manual; Window Maker is too much a change.. the *box's are also too difficult for 'casual' users.

I still say that unless you've decided to upgrade your PC to a better OS - use a Virtual Machine or one of the other suggestion that do not require re-formatting (WUBI)... Once you realize what you are missing and feel the awesomeness that is linux and want it to run at full speed.. THEN you can attempt the OP.. and the OP stressed it several times; so has numerous people throughout... back up your data and -expect- to lose your windows.. You may not; but that would be more the exception, not the rule.