I have an old Acer laptop, circa 2006. It’s a decent machine, 1.7 GHz Centrino Duo, 2 GB RAM, 15” screen. It came with Windows Vista Premium that we have been using since day one (don’t shoot me). I know there are a ton of complaints about Vista, but for the basic things we use this laptop for it has done a decent job with minimum trouble. However, there were a number of things about it that made me consider a switch to Ubuntu 10.10. ...

I haven’t tested this yet so not 100% sure it works. Looks interesting though and one of the better looking solutions for tweeting Nagios alerts since they moved to OAuth. http://jon.netdork.net/2010/10/13/nagios-notifications-via-twitter

Simple write up on installing Ubuntu 10.10 in Hyper-V. Link