As I am now self employed I need a new laptop and just at the right time a friend came along with a price on the Dell Vostro V130 that I just couldn't turn down.

It a fairly decent piece of kit, nice and light, compact size and has decent power (I might do a better review after I have used it for a while)

As it comes with a 500G drive I decided, know how good Dell is with Linux, I would save some space for a Kubuntu system and here I am using it to type this.

Normally you just download, burn to cd, reboot and install. One slight disadvantage of the v130, no optical drive. Should be easy USB installation here we come. Nope not that easy but if your stuck, here we go.

1 Install Slysofts Virtual clone drive, somethign you should install anyway due to oodles of time it can save.

2 Format your USB drive, it should be at least 1G in size

3 mount the (K)ubuntu iso in the virtual drive and the open the usb-creator.

4 select the image (should display as the mounted drive, select the usb drive, select the option "Discarded on shutdown unless you save them elsewhere" and then hit the "make startup disk" button

5 normally that would do but for some reason, this laptop does not work will with the version of syslinux that is installed by default so download the latest <a href="http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/" target="_blank">version</a> (4.03 in my case)

6 open a terminal windows, but running as administrator (right click run as admin)

7 navigate to the syslinux folder and the win32 folder

8 run syslinux.exe -ma f:  (where f: is the drive letter of the usb drive)

9 once that has run copy all the contents of the syslinux folder over to the usb drive syslinux folder

Bingo you should now be able to boot directly into kubuntu and run the install.

Although I haven't tested this there is no reason why this method couldn't be used to install any os, as I know someone who has the same laptop and needs to upgrade, I might just give it a try for Windows!