I'm still trying to figure out whether I'm going to try and keep running XP on my laptop or try to run XP under Ubuntu. Big problem with running Ubuntu is that hibernate does not work and I've spent several hours on it. Enough time that I'm not willing to spend more without confidence that the time will be well-spent.
I may just wait for Dell or someone else to come out with Ubuntu on their machines officially and then buy one of those. Hopefully WiFi and hibernate will work without the kind of work I'm having to do.
Right now, I'm sticking with XP on laptop and Ubuntu with desktop. This looks useful for Running a Windows Partition in VMware
I'm using VirtualBox and am pretty happy with it so far.