As they say, oranges are no the only fruit and Windows is not the only kind in the operating system playground. Trying other systems without throwing away what you already know can be a bit reckless. Here's one way of trying a popular free alternative whilst retaining your existing windows setup and giving you the ability to easily remove the installation if you no longer want it.
Ubuntu installer for windows is relatively new offering that installs Ubuntu linux as a disk image in your existing windows setup ,giving you a dual boot system at startup so you now have two computer systems to choose from.Ubuntu is very secure and does not have many of the virus and security worries of Windows.Another way to try running another system is to install VMware and run a "virtualisation" of another system within Windows. This means you get to run two desktops (2 computer systems!) at the same time but it does require a reasonable amount of memory and processing power.
VMware player
VMware Ubuntu Appliance
Xubuntu virtual apliance (good for lower memory)
Another solution in the virtualisation area is parallels which has a great solution for Max users so they can run Linux and Windows alongside their existing Mac software.
