I’m surfing FR now with Ubuntu 10.10, love it. Burn a live CD and give her a spin.
One thing: If you decide to install it after trying out the CD, it’s good to defragment your hard drive first. Windows has an option for system cleanup in your menu options. Defragging the drive will let Ubuntu have a good clean patch of drive to install to.
And it is always good to backup your files on Windows first. Ubuntu will put a new boot record on the drive so you can boot either Ubuntu or Windows. If something goes wrong — and it’s highly unlikely — Windows is gone. So just in case, make backups. But you should be ok, for most people it is nearly effortless.
You’ll like Ubuntu.
I have tried about 10 major distros, and like Linux Mint overall the best, but found Peppermint Linux, based upon Ubuntu, to be the best by far for old PCs/ I have it on a 450mhz box, 384mb ram for someone who just uses it for Internet access, and it runs Firefox, OpenOffice, TheWord Bible software (check out BPBible also) etc. quite well and as fast as Windows 98 would.
I myself use a much tweaked XP, while in over 10 years of heavy Internet use i only have had one virus using Windows, which i spotted under W/98se as i checked what was running. Thanks be to God. Pray and press.
I do have Linux Mint on a second HD (where an optical drive would normally be) but the major drawback is the legal codec issue. (1Pt. 2:13) As far as i can tell it is illegal to play DVD’s and other formats which use proprietary codecs in countreis le the USA, though you can buy them form Fluendo. While Peppermint apparently comes with DVD codecs they are not used, and i plan to remove them, while the Linux Mint is the universal installer that does not have them.
Linux advocates also should not say Linux is easy as Windows, as there can be a substantial learning curve do get some things working as they should, or as you would like (its permissions restrictions can also be an issue on secondary drives, but not as much as Vista), with some versions more then others, while the lack of uniformity has some drawbacks.
But I am glad to have the Linux option, and it has lots of potential, if the codec issue could just be solved i would promote it.