godspeed

first of all this is my first post here been kinda looking around. im not new to computers in general (just new to linux). I know almost everything there is to know about windows mainly because windows was the only os they sold at the store were i bought all my parts for my first computer about 14+ years ago.

Now i wanna toy around with linux.

I have an old computer (intel 533mhz) i found in the dumpster about 2 years ago
i threw a copy of winxp on it and its been peen pretty good to me no major ploblems.

it is a headless machine meaning i run it through vnc theres no monitor/keyboard/mouse hooked up to it.

Im gonna stop wasting your time. i need a linux distro that will support thr following with minimal configuration.

all the free space on its hard drives need to be accessible from any windows machine (i run a dhcp network last time i tried to setup samba it wanted to know sertain machines ip addresses and they change from time to time with dhcp) so maby something that supports that

it needs to ofcouse support vnc unless you can control it from a webpage like some of the router firewall versions of linux do.

it also needs to be able to download files from the internet via torrent/ftp/http
sometimes i have huge files for work that i neeed to download and work on and i don't wanna leave my main pc/laptop on.

any ideas or should i just keep the windows box the way it is?

sorry for the long post