I've just acquired a second PC, a Compaq Pressario running on a P3. I
was told that it was not running properly and I expected to be
stripping it down for parts. Anyway, I got it home, connected
everything up and, lo and behold! it's running XP Professional fine.

This gave me the ideal opportunity to experiment with dual booting
with nothing to lose. I read lots of posts on the forums, some of
which were quite scary and most of which difficult to follow, so I
decided to just jump in the deep end - as I say, nothing to lose,really.

The existing setup was XP on the 10Gb master drive and a 40Gb slave
for data, which had less than 2Gb on it. Some of the posts I read
suggested disconnecting the primary hard drive, installing ubuntu on
the secondary drive (temporarily set to master) and then reconnecting
the XP volume. However, I decided to just go all out for it and leave
both drives in place.

The install ran perfectly, ubuntu gave me a choice about partition
sizes and I decided to resize the partitions on the slave to roughly
50% each for windows data and ubuntu.

On reboot, I am given the option of which OS to boot to - exactly what
I had hoped for.

Two short questions for you brainy guys.
1. Is there any way to adjust the time delay for choosing which OS to
boot to? At the moment, if I leave the computer for a few seconds, it
boots to ubuntu as default.
2. Ubuntu can see everything on the windows partitions but XP cannot
see the files on ubuntu. Is there any way round this or is this just
another example of windoze pigheadeness?