I've been donated a desktop computer (fairly high spec, dual core HP multimedia) which had a virus on it which I couldn't get rid of, so I reckon it'll be a good project to blat it, and slap some kind of linux on it and see how it behaves.

It's been a few years since I exclusively ran linux on a PC, most of my experiences so far have been on mandrake/mandriva, but I've played a little with some of the others.

I stopped using mandriva cause they started charging for anything like a full distro, and the releases seemed to be becoming more and more buggy and problematic. In fact, I don't think I managed to get the software updates working for the last 3 mandriva upgrades I did, despite spending days trying to fix the problem!

I've heard good things about recent linux distros, (ubuntu in particular) and I've had a cracking little USB stick with slax on it for a year or so which seems to work on anything - so I'm looking forward to the experience!

The next post will include my current hardware, and thoughts on which distros to start off with. Any contributions / suggestions will be welcome.