i'm sure that there are tons of these posts, and i apologize for this, but i am a bit overwhelmed by all of the choices. I have:
2.8GHz dual core processor
256MB NVIDIA 7300LE vid card
2GB RAM
X-Fi audio card
Dual booting XP and Vista

Recently i (torrented) got vista and was fairly disgusted by the fact that to merely run photoshop, some chat windows, and wmp took over 1 GB of RAM. I'm looking for an OS that is polished and could more or less replace windows for me. Thanks for helping a newbie.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that i want something installed to a harddrive, previously i had been looking for a livecd, but know i'm prepared to install linux. i have partitionmagic should i need to repartition.

Read thru the Major Distributions link at DistroWatch, and see if anything there appeals to you. Then take a look at the Distro specific forums here at LQ, and see if you think the kind of help you are likely to need seems available.

And don't ask such a subjective question any more. They're all equally good. Read thru any of 10,000 or so threads started with this question, and you'll soon see what I mean.

Anything in the top ten on the Distrowatch "hit list" will be fine.

Personally, I favor distros that use the APT/Synaptic package sytem: Ubuntu, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, etc.