Discworld, period, good for anyone of any age. You might have to do some research into which books are more appropriate for an 8 year old, but the whole series is phenomenal.

LOTR tends to be too dense for most young kids...in fact even as an adult I have issues with it. It's also very long and sometimes younger kids want to move on to the next story. I would start with The Hobbit as it flows nicely and you can lead into LOTR better with it than vice versa.

Absolutely yes, all of Madeline L'Engle's books are amazing for children. I grew up with the Time Quartet (A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet [my personal fave]) and they're intelligent, easy to follow, exciting sci-fi books with great characters and original stories.

Yep, this is my experience too. The ntfs-3g module is definitely the way to go, let's you read, write, create new files, do whatever you want. The only limitation I've come across with it is if you try to access a drive that was turned off with hibernate (ie you hibernate your windows and then load up *nix and try to read the drive...doesn't work) but I feel like that's an obvious limitation.

Just let Dell keep it's images, but next time it upgrades or changes the images in any way, Word will have to be removed? Or is that too much bureaucracy?

i remember reading about this several years ago in a magazine in a doctors office...

Is it still insanely counter-intuitive and hard to learn? The blender i used for rendering was nigh-impossible to figure out without at least three tutorials.