Yes, I've kept it up-to-date. And, yes, I realize 8.04 is an LTS (yey! I
actually KNOW what that means!). Hardy works well enough ... but there
is some fine tuning that I hope will be resolved with the final release.

This is more the larger issue of having problems with flash drives all
of a sudden. I was able, through, lots of google-ing, to finally resolve
a problem with being able to mount the drive in the first place. But, I
can't boot an OS from it for some reason (which is how I installed
Ubuntu on this machine in the first place).

My machine is - while only a year old - in short, a piece of junk. I
finally made the plunge to commit to Linux, and Ubuntu specifically,
because it runs quicker and smoother than Windows on this machine.