Red Hat ask that you pay to use their OS. Red Hat do not explicitly say on their website "here you can download Red Hat Linux free and use it" therefore Red Hat themselves do not offer it free of charge.
The fact you can get it free, and licensing means it's not illegal, does not stop it being a paid for distro.
Want something to contrast it with? Look at Slackware which is entirely free but can also be bought.
Talking about grey areas of being able to obtain an unsupported .iso or a clone of the OS made by somebody else does not stop Red Hat from being commercial software for which they charge money.
https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/142303
There, no mention of "try it free".

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I agree here, only if the OP knows how optimize the boot process, including the services, of course, any Linux distro will be running smooth if you know what changes to make. But I kind of doubt the OP is able to do such tweaks at this moment of his/her Linux career. So, in my opinion, suggesting to load a hog, or rather mammoth on a poor, old PC, that will start kicking the swap the moment the login window appears, is a poor, unreasonable suggestion: redhat, centos and fedora... OP being a newbie, giving him a dinosaur to fit in a trunk of a Yugo - well, he will sooner or later say that Linux sucks... at least I would. A good piece advise is what OP is looking for... Tread him/her right... that's all.

btw: does CentOS come on CDs? - My P4 laptop had a CD-ROM... After downloading the 4.2GB image, burning, he might find out that all he has is a CD-ROM drive... I guess, he won't be happy.

the mirror i like
http://mirrors.arsc.edu/centos/6/isos/i386/
has a live cd that can be installed and a minimal cd
CentOS-6.4-i386-LiveCD.iso
CentOS-6.4-i386-minimal.iso

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That is not entirely true!

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux" is a based on open source but contains commercial software packages which are sold. The price is different depending on the version. https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html
"Fedora" is a free distribution. It is actually Red Hat as well as CentOS is but is it free of commercial software packages and therefore free. But Fedora is not located on the redhat website. It has its own website on http://fedoraproject.org/

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The netinstall for example is a CD which boots a basic system for the installation and downloads all the packages during installation.

ya thank u all for giving me such nice suggestions.. at last i want to install fedora 19 for my lap..

and such a nice community which is very helpful for like me.......

thanking u all once again..

my easiest distro over the last few years, updates and all (or usb\other), was Ubuntu...☮

I felt I made the right choice, so far it out performs XP (which is the original O/S put in my PC).

I don't subscribe to any distro in particular but I tried Red Hat (>10 years ago), it initially put me off Linux all together but I've only, in the last week, installed Fedora 19 and it is brilliant.

To answer any query, I only chose Fedora because it was RH (or at least a derivative) and it was a 'flavour' of Linux that I had some exposure to (very little but enough to be the one to 'test drive') and so far I haven't wasted the 5+ minutes it takes to boot up XP when FC19 does it in just a touch over 1.