I am a self-taught geek familiar with most winOS and apps, can troubleshoot remotely. familiar enough with HW as well to have built what was a respectable system a couple of years ago (p4, dual HDs, 2GB RAM, etc). I am very disenchanted with much of what win has to "offer." most of what I do is music, vid, net/info and communications related. it's been eons since I aced assembly language and many other languages challenge me, but am bright enough to pick them up if need be. (I want to set up a website as well!) I like the idea of possibly setting up my machine to dual boot but don't know what Linux can do "better" than win apps w/o guidance. a live distro may also be appealing. ideally, tho? I have an older system (p3 perhaps) with decent HD space and maybe 512MB RAM that I would like to use as a security cop so to speak, to filter all net traffic for unwanted goodies like viruses, spyware, intruders, etc. lots to consider, I know. I'm open to anyone's help. thank you in advance. peace.

Anything you want to do, you can do with any Linux distribution. You can get your music and internet going with no problems and you don't really need to know any programming language to do anything on Linux. All distributions are graphically driven these days, which means it's all point-and-click. Everything you've written in this post, can be done with any Linux distribution. In fact, if you google search, you'll find excellent documentation for each of those topics. Apart from dual-booting and using Live CDs, you can also look into virtualization tools such VMWare and MS Virtual PC. These allow you to install Linux within and existing installation of WIndows, without partitioning the drive. You will however need more than 512 MB RAM to achieve respectable performance. Cheers!

good explanation. thanks for this document.