So you took my advice and installed Ubuntu with help from the best thing since LiveCD (Hint: Wubi), and now that you are happy with your experience with a “safe” install of Ubuntu, the next logical step would be to have a dedicated install on a separate partition or even better move your existing wubi install to a full fledged install of Ubuntu. (The third logical step would be to remove windows altogether and only have Linux installed in your computer, but we will take one step at a time to de-toxify years of windows usage). Purely performance wise you won’t see much difference when you move from a wubi install to a dedicated install – considering that you have a fairly fast hard drive and that your windows partition is not heavily fragmented. However, moving to a dedicated install does give a better safety net in case of hard-reboots or upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu (I never had problems with upgrading, but some users did).

Transferring a wubi installation is possible with the help of LVPM (Loopmounted Virtual Partition Manager). It is advised that you create two new partitions prior to using LVPM to transfer your Wubi settings. One partition for your actual Ubuntu install and second one for swap, to avoid accidently writing over your root partition.

Pat yourself in the back; you just took one giant step towards total freedom. :)