I tried this initially, and it worked like a dream.. However, I
suspect that for someone who wishes to eventually give up windows
altogether, it might not be for them.. I couldn't see a way of
removing windows without removing the wubi install too.. Once I
realised I'd be sticking with Ubuntu, I opted for a totally clean
re-install.. Luckily I'd not been using it that long before I realised
what I wanted to do.. I suspect if you've used Wubi for 6 months or
more, and have your programs set up as you wish, it could be harder
then to get rid of windows totally..

I personally think it's a halfway house between a live cd and a full
install.. It gives the undecided people a chance to play with Ubuntu
for a while...

The wubu installer comes in the 8.04 live cd.You can run it from your cd after
you boot into windows.I havent tried it because I dont use windows anymore. It
would be a good way to try it before doing a complete install

Is anyone else wondering how long it's going to be before we hear of
someone running Wubi inside Windows running on a virtual machine under
Ubuntu?

Or is it just my warped sense of humour

Wubi is best for people who still want to use Windows as their
regular OS, but want to give Ubuntu a try, but are leery about setting up
partitions. It gives better performance the going with the Live CD and you can
add programs and save settings which you cannot easily do from a Live CD.

As with all convenient things there is a down side which you have correctly
pointed out.

One more nice feature of the 8.04 Live CD (besides adding wubi if you put the CD
in a Windows machine) is that it now says, “Try Ubuntu without any change to
your computer” on the grub menu instead of the more banal message of old to Run
or Install Ubuntu. This is sure to instill confidence in people who do not want
to try anything new for fear it will cause a mess that they can't fix.

It is sometimes the small things that make or break it for someone sitting on
the fence.

Finally, you bring up one of my pet subjects. When you install Ubuntu as a fresh
installation it is worthwhile to take one extra step and add a separate
partition for /home which keeps your data and settings separate and makes
re-installation a breeze. Not only can you re-install Ubuntu, but you can even
switch to another distro and not skip a beat.

I strayed from the 'one-true-path-that-is-Ubuntu' (joke! ;-) ) and
tried Mandriva, Suse and Fedora recently and, despite having a separate
/home partition, ran into problems - basically, two of the distros (I
*think* Mandriva and Suse, but I don't rightly remember, this being a
short while ago and me being slightly the worse for alcohol at the
moment, sorry) set the user ID to a different number than Ubuntu had
used so, despite the fact that I set the same user name, I couldn't
access any files - a problem solved by a quick visit to the terminal and
a 'chown -R' - only the third distro had the intelligence to see that
the user names were the same despite different UIDs and offer to
transfer ownership.

You can have more than one user name in the /home partition. You may use
separate ones for Mandriva and Suse for example. I typically use roy-u for
Ubuntu and roy-s for SUSE. Then I drag files and folders that I want to share to
the new user directory, either moving or copying them as I choose.
Once I am sure that I am going to stick with a distro, I delete the other user
accounts. Once you know is where your Firefox bookmarks and mail are stored it
is easy to just drag them around wherever you go. Documents may be stored in
their original folders and opened as needed from their previous location or
dragged to the new user account as you wish.

KDE settings are harder to find. Settings specific to KDE all reside inside the
.kde/share/apps/ folder instead of separately for each application. I keep my
fonts in the .fonts folder. I now have over 7000 fonts which is far too many,
but I am too lazy to go through them. It is on my "Someday" list which never
seems to get done.