Thank you very much. I'll do that.
I'll second N3WBI3's suggestion of trying out one of the "live" cds. There are many of them out there that are really good. If you run into something weird, feel free to post into one of these tech threads. There are several folks who do unix here, and we don't bite (much).
The biggest problem you will likely run into is wireless networking, If your laptop has built in wireless. You could get lucky and have drivers for the wireless built in. The laptop I got with my last laptop upgrade at work happens to have the Intel 2200BG chipset on the wireless, and it worked like magic. I was pretty stoked, as I've had to mess with "ndiswrappers" which is a workaround that uses windows drivers for many chipsets that aren't supported far more often than I'd like.
If your wireless isn't supported out of the box and you want to go ahead with it anyway, send me a freepmail, and I'll try to help.