Ubuntu 9.04 Questions?

RUN IT LIVE which is precisely what I am doing at the moment as the rest of my system has gone down. Firefox 3 for Web Browsing Pidgin for Mail https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Pidgin OpenOffice 3 for Office Documents ITS ALL INCLUDED. LUg.

I would not try it. Having your OS CD is essential for this process if something goes wrong. Try and get a CD from either HP or Microsoft if you can. They might let you if you tell them your genuine CD key. Good luck and I hope you like Ubuntu. I didn't lol.

there may be an option in like system tools to burn your own recovery disks there should be a recovery partition on your computer if you leave that one alone you should be alright if the computer is less then 1 year old you can call hp and have them mail you a set of recovery disks free

You can install Ubuntu on your Vista, like another program, it will create a folder on your C hard drive named Ubuntu, this will no affect your windows installation but it will give you the chance to choose the OS you want to work with at the Boot Screen. Then you can uninstall it and nothing will happen to your Windows Vista, actually I'm working this way. The only difference is that I'm using Windows XP.

Everybody that answered so far is correct. If you don't want to go though the hassle of calling hp for your system disk, then I would make an image backup of your system. The one I used is called macrium reflect. There is a free version of it that works well. You can down load it here http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp. That way if you decide that you rather have ubuntu 9.04 installed on your machine, you feel safe that you have the capability to go back to the original os at any time.