Yes, I had a broadcom wifi adapter for the previous family computer--total nightmare trying to get it to play with various Linux flavors.

The ultimate USB-based Linux is probably Puppy, since USB was its framework all along. The rub with dual boot is that you have to be physically near the machine, and if I was there, I wouldn't have to worry about the shared Public folder in the first place. I could share through bluetooth.

Yeah, I just can't figure out the Outlook replacement thing. I have 15K emails archived by month//year, and I haven't found a way to incorporate that huge .pst into a safe Linux alternative. At least Outlook Express had separate files for those months...

And I agree: downgrading to Win7 is problematic. I hadn't realized that MS was already dumbing down its support for Win7.

Of course, the wild card might be Win10--will its Public folder continue to be so persnickety? The desktop's relatively new, so I may rate for a free upgrade.

None of this takes away from my pleasure with my N810 I really enjoy this machine, no matter how late I've come to the party.

Jake

Edit: one other thing. With an N810 that did not have Samba installed via repo, I was still able to browse XP/Linux shares. I wonder what that Samba deb actually does. Upgrade the current Samba install?