Having seen all the press on the various forums regarding Linux I am seriously thinking of making the jump. However I don't want to lose the large amount of windows based data that I have i.e. Word and excell files. I've done some searching and have read some stuff on the WINE emulator.

My questions are,

How well does this emulator perform, what are the drawbacks (if any). Is there anyone actually using this if so can I get some feedback. Is there another option?

I have used *nix emulators on a Win NT OS and that worked fine. However that doesn't mean that the opposite is true. *nix is an open system designed for portability. M$ is an organisation designed to port $$$$ from your pocket to their accounts