Quote Originally Posted by Marvin_The_Martian View Post
Yeah I been thinking about doing just that

Will go ubuntu as most tell me that's a good starting place ( as opposed to gentoo ) but you linux guys tend to all like their own package the most anyway
Ubuntu is a very good choice to get your feet wet with Linux the project is very active and up to date. You will not get maximum performance as it is not optimized for your specific system its more generic so that it will work on almost any system. Gentoo on the other hand is performance optimized since you compile/emerge each and every application for your specific system its not near as active as Ubuntu but is very well documented. Gentoo is one of the best options for a Laptop since it is customized for the hardware however it can take a very very long time to install I used it for a while on a old P4 2ghz laptop I had and it took about 2 days to initially install with all the emerging. If you want a desktop that looks and behaves more like Windows you might check out the KDE desktop used in Kubuntu. Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop which is more popular then KDE but take a little more time to learn from a previous Windows user.