Over the past couple of days I made a lot of changes.. probably more than is safe to push into one long series of upgrades/changes.

I looked at the couple of the Virtual Machines that I had running on one of my Linux servers and decided that I no longer needed them or I could move that functionality someplace else. The VMs are now gone and that machine is being repurposed.
My main Linux machine was running on a dual core laptop with 4gb of RAM. I had so much stuff plugged into it that it was no longer a laptop. The performance was ok but starting to become noticeable.
The repurposed desktop has 8gb of RAM and a dual core AMD processor. It is not a smoking machine by any stretch of the imagination but it is decent machine. It got reformatted and I installed Ubuntu 9.10 64bit on it. (10.4 was not quite out when I started this project.) I then migrated the data from the laptop over to the desktop. I had a couple initial issues; the swap drive was not correctly configured, the audio was extremely low, etc.
Once Ubuntu 10.4 LTS was released I upgraded the machine.
Next I installed a cheap Sound Blaster PCI sound card, 5 port USB PCI card, DVD RW drive, and a multi function card reader. (The machine already has 3 internal hard drives + some external USB drives)
Now my audio issue is resolved. I resolved a weird error about my second hd saying: "/110 is not ready yet or not present" --I updated fstab with: nobootwait

I have a couple of other minor issues to tackle. Most of this stuff would never be an issue for an average user installing this as a clean installation. This is a migration+upgrade+hw additions.

I am feeling better about my ability to troubleshoot my configuration. I am total neophyte on Linux but finding that it is not really that difficult to work with. This 8gb system with full size drives is quite a bit faster than my dual core laptop.

So far I do not really like the Ubuntu 10.4 color scheme a some of the menu changes. This is probably the first release where I can say that changes bother me. I am taking it with a grain of salt by assuming that there are some features that I will really like once I dig into them or that it is even more stable than my previously stable systems.

I want to get through these upgrades so that I can go back to working on figuring out how to my 16F628A say "hello world."