[zozbot234]

> My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant!

That's not too far from the performance you can get from a plain Linux install and a lightweight DE (Xfce/LXDE). Though I'll grant you that Office 2003 is going to be a lot lighter than its modern free equivalent.

[nebula8804]

The problem is the time spent setting up this environment and dealing with the inevitable Linux issues exceeds the ease of setup of the said Windows environment. I am aware though that the windows env is unsustainable due to it being discontinued.