my friend reid has had enough registry trouble with his XP laptop that he is finally coming to me wanting help to install linux. now i'm the sort who installs precise from the core tar.gz (why bother buy & burn blanks? why annoy myself with installers?), so i'm thinking grab whatever live CD may be lying around, backup XP with dd if=partition|ssh dd, shrink that XP partition, plunk in precise core, apt-get willy nilly, including virtualbox for his must-have XP programs. but wait, i dunno that just any live CD can be relied upon to shrink ntfs. this is where i'd like to hear your experiences. if we must burn something, of course there are a million answers, but in your opinion, what's best? i tend to be attracted to LTS knowing i won't be forced to install again all too soon, but i feel the tempting pull of the notion that mint may be more suited to an inveterate windoze user, more likely to leave him happy than precise. and there's the question of that dd backup, are there approaches you'd say are quicker or smarter (no handy external disc here)? as for partitioning, i'm always in favor of leaving the original in place until the new has actually proven to obviate it. given that he's already filled 35g of the 60g disc leaving 25g to play with, how much would you throw to swap? which installers or others would you certify as reliable for shrinking ntfs? is it best to use winders defrag first?