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I am new to ubuntu and am curious as to the best way to go about installing it.

I currently have:

  • Toshiba Satellite A300 PSAJ0C-SH308C
  • Running Windows Vista Home Edition

Is it better to wipe the hard drive completely and freshly install Ubuntu? Or is it better to just install on top of it?

I want to do a fresh install as it just seems better but I am concerned that if I cleanse my hard drive that I will no longer have full functionality of my PC since I will be missing my drivers (eg wireless). All of the drivers on the Toshiba website are for Windows.

Please advise.

Thanks.

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    I will recommend dual booting windows and ubuntu. – linuxk Jul 29 '13 at 04:03
  • I'd suggets to simply try with the live-CD how well your hardware is supported by Ubuntu out of the box. In many cases, you don't need any additional drivers. In case something does not work, please edit your question to include a detailed list of your hardware. To get such a list, open a terminal (while running the Live-CD) and run lspci. You can copy&paste from the terminal window. – soulsource Jul 29 '13 at 05:52

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If you have enough juice in your hardware, I recommend you to first install it in a virtual machine (using VirtualBox for example) if you fancy the word "installation" or just play with the live version of Ubuntu for a while. I am an ex-owner of (I think) the same Toshiba notebook and had bad experience years ago. However things have changed and improved (more or less) so drivers will probably not be an issue. Before you install a new OS, it is always a good idea to do some research and see if others had good/bad experience with Ubuntu and your model in particular. Drivers provided by the notebook-manufacturers are in 99% of all cases extremely outdated. They usually provide some drivers once (when the model appears on the market) and that's it. So you will probably get newer (and better) drivers than you have in Windows (unless you install for example customized GPU drivers in Windows like I do).

I might be going too far but I do believe that if the drivers are the only thing that keeps Vista Home Edition on your hard drive you should format your hard drive (after you make sure that you won't have too many troubles with having just Linux on your notebook) and install Ubuntu.