When my daughter's XP Viao went down, I burned the Ubuntu startup/install disk and booted it from that. Took all the data files off on to a USB hard drive, no problem. Then installed Ubuntu as the only OS. She loves it.
I also installed it on my laptop, only with a dual boot system. Pretty impressive. If I were not married to Corel Draw for business reasons I'd set at least one of my boxes up as Ubuntu only.
Might want to look at Linux Mint...which is built on top of Ubuntu....has a lot of the work already done,...for Youtube viewing,...etc.