The Open Source Movement is upon us. Despite Microsoft slapping cases of violating patents (ya right ! ) Linux has emerged as a clear winner between the battle of OSes. With the failure of Vista and release of Linux Distributions, targeted at home desktop users, like Ubuntu the shift to GNU/Linux is clear as the difference between oil and water.
My personal experience was one such. I have a Laptop with mediocre specs (Intel Pentium IV and 256 MB Ram). Recently the laptop had started to get awfully sluggish. The booting time shot up to 3 minutes and right clicking the desktop required you to wait for 3 good seconds untill the context menu came up. Frustrated, I tried everything. Spyware Scan, AntiVirus Scan, Defragmented, Rootkit, Bootkit(?), Cleaning-with-harpic(?) ! Nothing seemed to work. Well knowing Windows for a long time now, I knew it was time for a clean format and reinstall. The problem this time was that the Laptop was pre-loaded with Genuine Windows XP (No No! It came PRE-LOADED, I didn’t commit sin! ). Having no clue where the bundled CD was, I had two choices – Format and Install with ‘my XP CD’ or Format and install Linux. The latter appealed to me more. I had always been fascinated by Linux but unfortunately the fascination never lasted more than a week. Taking a bold decision, I popped in the Xubuntu CD and proceeded with a clean install (Key data backed up). I chose Xubuntu because it is been known for its light-weight XFCE Desktop Environment. The installation was quick and simple. Within the hour I was already downloading my favorite applications 
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Its been about a week now, and I have faced no, absolutely NO, problems using Xubuntu. THe community support is fantastic and applications run, eh sprint rather, smoothly. Boot up time is now under 1 min and I see no turning back to Windows after this. Farewell XG, oh what was it ? XP ? 
PS : A very good friend of mine texted me about his computer dying a slow death. His XP showed the infamous
When you say “I wrote a program that crashed Windows”, people just stare at you blankly and say ‘Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*’.
–Linus Torvlads
Congrats! Welcome to the world of GNU/Linux
And good you brought some friends along! The more the better! That way we can reach our goal of world domination sooner than we expect!