Ubuntu!!

I took an antiquated 750 Mhz computer with 128MB of ram and put Ubuntu on it, and I must say.. It screams. It hasnt locked up once and I've been using it for 6 months. I do alot of Image Editing on it with Gimp and what not. Firefox works fine. I can't really complain. It seems like Ubuntu has breathed a new breath of life into my old hardware.

I have a crappy 333Mhz Dell laptop, 256 Mb RAM, and I would have tried it on that one, but guess what?... it's the only PC machine I have that works without problems! I'm afraid to do anything to it.

You could always set it up as a Dual Boot. Also, Linux typically has whats called Wine, which is a Windows emulator. it doesnt run perfectly... but it runs most apps.

I've been using FreeBSD or Linux as my primary desktop for the past 8 years, and although there's a lot of junk that I remove from the standard Ubuntu desktop installation, Karmic (9.10) is incredibly slick.

also...

Nvidia + Twinview + Compiz + Dual 22"s = Beautiful

STDs would beg to differ.

Okay, I'm making the Ubuntu plunge tonight. Gonna try it out on a live disc immediately, and install it a bit later. Curiosity has killed this cat, and I'm tired of looking at my useless PC.

Good luck man. I just got another PC and I have a problem throwing away perfectly good equipment so I'm going to put ubuntu on it as well and if someone wants it, they can have it. Until then Im going to turn it into a file server / dev box (I do freelance PHP MySQL work from time to time)

Your Add/Remove programs will be your best friend in Ubuntu. I love the fact that I dont have to purchase software anymore. Almost anything you need is in Add Remove (Because it downloads the apps from the internet for free)

Do you plan on doing the dual boot or formatting the whole drive and installing the linux file system and gui on your entire partition?

I'll probably dual boot it. To be honest, I don't have any real use for it... it only has one program that I use- REAPER- and I rarely ever use that at all. I'm thinking of this machine as a 'netsurfing backup for when my lady's laptop fails (and it WILL fail). I'll have her use it as an Ubuntu machine and just leave Windeath on a partition just in case I ever need to use REAPER for something.

You can also run it as a virtuel machine. Use virtualbox, it's free.
http://www.virtualbox.org/

Changed my mind... I'm trying to install on the entire drive. I've had 3 failures trying to split it, and now Windeath won't operate either. Kept freezing up during install... so far it's doing alright, farther than before.