I installed Mandrake (for the first time) on my current PC about a year ago. After configuring the drivers and what not, everything seemed to work fine, but everything also ran HORRIBLY slow. It couldn't have been my PC, cuz I'm running an AMD XP 2600+ operating at 2.13GHz w/ 512 MB RAM. On this machine, XP can run several memory hogging programs without a single hitch. I couldn't figure out why Linux was running so slow for the life of me, so I took that bitch off of my hard drive. I may give it another go sometime, but I don't know.

Windows works for me. As long as you ('you' in general) aren't careless about your web surfing and installation methods, you don't really have to worry about all the viruses and spyware and whatever other overhyped crap there is.