As SiN said, use Knoppix if you don't want to risk the current OS.
Use Redhat or Mandrake if you're new to it all and can afford to use a comp for it. Look at the first few pages of this forum, they'll hold a lot of Linux threads (usually about what distro to use).
Hopefully (usually) drivers for your hardware will be included w/ your distro of Linux. Installing drivers in Linux is different than installing in Windows, and is a more complex process. Be prepared to accept that you can't always just point+click like Windows. You only really need worry about that if your hardware isn't supported w/ the latest version of Linux (it usually is). Two exceptions I've seen:
* I have an nvidia graphics card. Redhat (Fedora) comes with drivers, but NVidia has also released their own (closed-source
) version. Their drivers are pretty easy to install, but still, more than just point+click. Have to use command line.
* My WiFi network card wasn't well supported under Linux. There's a program called DriverLoader (google it) that uses your Windows versions of the drivers for Linux. Those bastards just started charging for it though, so you'd have limited time to use it unless you want to pay.
Otherwise, drivers for everything else were fine.
If you don't like Linux, you can just pop in a WinXP disc (or a Win98 boot disk or something) and delete the current partitions (at least one for linux root (/) and one for swap). Then create DOS partitions and away you go.