[Hampshire] Problems changing boot order in Ubuntu

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking on this list for quite a while, always meaning to come
to a meeting but always having been too tied up with work (I'm a student
at Southampton Uni). Anyway, I seem to be having a bit of a problem now
and I thought someone might be able to help.

I'm trying to change the grub boot order on my Ubuntu install to set
Windows as the default boot option. Don't worry, I haven't given up on
linux - it's just that my windows laptop has been sent away for repair
so I'm having to use the windows option on this laptop more. From
reading various forum posts I found that apparently all I had to do was
to change the value of the 'default' configuration parameter in menu.lst
and it would change. However, that doesn't seem to have happened.

I've now made various alterations to menu.lst and none of them seem to
have changed anything at all. For example, I got rid of an entry that I
never used, and it still appears in the list. It seems like I need to do
something to actually put the commands in menu.lst into action - but I
don't know what (and none of the forum posts mentioned that). I remember
when I used to use gentoo I had to edit menu.lst and then run something
like grub-install. Is that needed on ubuntu? I also found the
update-grub script, but that seems to crash saying it can't delete menu.lst~

Any ideas anyone? I'm a bit wary of trying too much in the dark - cause
if I can't get into Windows at the moment then I'll be really stuck!

Cheers,

Robin