You're not stupid. You've come to the community for help, which is what we are here to do. From your description it sounds as though you have a bad load or a cantankerous version of Linux. I was never a big fan of Freespire, especially with the parent company Linspire in disarray.

As far as distributions to try I'd recommend Ubuntu because it has excellent hardware compatibility, a huge community to utilize as a resource and is built on Debian (a solid distro).

The link to get a copy is here: [url]http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu[/url]

The other one I would suggest is openSUSE.

[url]http://software.opensuse.org/[/url]

Hope that helps!