Well, after trying loads of distros I eventually decided on one and decided to have a trial install on an old laptop currently running XP. Now I'm not going to tell you what distro I decided on because I dont want to criticise but I will post my observations from time to time if I think it might help other newbies.
Ok, the laptop is 256mb ram with a 10gb hard drive partitioned as 2gb and 8gb. So what I decided to do was to partition the partition ! and give 4gb to linux and leave the rest for storage (this is a test remember). Loaded the live cd and ran the install icon and was led gently through to where it asked me if I wanted to install on the partition (it didn't seem to recognise the individual partitions, only the fact that I had one drive, which strictly speaking was true) so I thought sod it, I'll give it a go. (I suppose I ought to digress a bit here and come clean to tell you that I have been an IT 'professional' for 25 years so am very comfortable hacking around with equipment and software although it is 15 years or more since I played with what was then UNIX., anyway, on with the story...) At this point I strongly suspected that it would overwrite the whole drive and wipe windows but hey, lifes for learning. Sure enough, I was suddenly presented with a message telling me I was going to wipe windows and was I sure. I escaped out of that and was then led through to a package called QTParted which is very similar to Partition Magic. went through the usual partitioning malarkey following the very clear instructions EXCEPT, at the very last, when I was told to commit, it hadn't told me to format the Linux partition. As a quick test I exited and, sure enough, there was no partition there. Reboot back into the CD, go around again, reformat the drive and install the software. All went swimmingly until it asked me where I wanted GRUB to go (it recommended MBR) and I am positive I had read earlier today that putting GRUB into the MBR on an XP machine caused a problem so I plumped for Root ! Needless to say I rebooted and I still have a lovely little portable with Windows XP, no Linux and I 'm 5gb worse off. Bugger... I'm sure I read that right about MBR and XP.
Oh well, I'll reinstall tomorrow and put GRUB where it wants to go (in MBR).
Other than that, it all went swimmingly.
I'll let you know if/when I install everything ok