Windows XP Pro user trying to find the Linux for me

by Charles A. Tilley (catilley)

For months now, I have been interested in Linux. I've been a XP Pro user for a long time. The first Linux distro I tried was Ubuntu , but it was installed through Wubi and the performance wasn't good, As a newbie, I had a lot of trouble with everything, except browsing and emailing. I downloaded and tried my very best to install Firefox 3.5 and the driver for my Dell 720 inkjet printer. But I failed to catch on to the OS.

Anyway, that laptop went down due to hard drive problems. Now I'm back at square one. At first, I was very interested in Freespire, and got the CD only to find out the distro is dead. I found out this by trying to join a forum to get help. I couldn't join because it was dead as well. On another forum, I asked about a distro for newbies and PCLinuxOS-2009 was suggested to me, as well as Xandros. I would like to give PCLinuxOS a shot, because of the strong support that I heard is there. But I need to confirm, is this distro really for a newbie? I hope so, because I'm tired of being told what I can and can't do with Windows. I couldn't even use the backup of my deceased laptop on this one after I paid $160 for the license. That's just not right, and I'm tired of it.

I downloaded PCLinuxOS-2009-2 (a 690MB ISO) and copied it to CD. I'm supposed to get some partitioning and recovery tools on CD early next week. Please advise me if this is or may be the right choice for me.

Thank you all for your time, I know my words may sound confusing, but I'm doing the best I can. Also, to let everyone know that I'm serious, I bought a second laptop just to learn Linux. I'm looking forward to joining the Linux family!