Sorry if I am showing my age, but it has been awhile since I did any serious PC building.

I have a Gateway GT5426E, which came with VISTA.  One day, I tried to do a clean install of XP.  Yes, XP installed, but there were about 14 drivers missing for the proprietary gateway mobo. Needless to say, I went back to Vista while I plot my next move.

Now, I am looking at this motherboard.  I want to slap this puppy in a case, and dual boot an UBUNTU 64 bit distro and XP.

Are all motherboards standard now?  Will any old mobo fit in a Gateway tower, or do I need to buy a new case?  I could give 2 craps less what it looks like.  (As long as Vista just goes away, I'll be happy...)

Quoted: when you loaded xp,  did you lookin on gateways website to see if drivers were available? i would leave it as is and try to load ubuntu.    im betting ubuntu will find the drivers on the gateway board over the one from Compusa

Thx for the response. To answer your questions:  

No XP drivers are available through the Gateway website for this model.  

The mobo I want, after much linux forums searching, will work with all flavors of linux.

I want to someday become a dedicated linux person.  However, I would like to be able to boot to XP if necessary.  (Although, going straight to linux without a life preserver might expedite my perma-switch to linux...)

My 2 cents..

Don't bother putting a new motherboard in the gateway, it will be more trouble than it's worth..

Get an ATX form factor motherboard and an ATX form factor case with at least a 500 watt power supply.

I'm dual booting Vista and Ubuntu on a Dell laptop. Its actually pretty easy with Vista because you can change the primary partition size on the fly, giving  you space to install Linux.


Its pretty sweet. I use Vista for 95% of my computing needs and dip into Ubuntu when I need to do cool geek stuff.