I am soon going to pick up a small crap HDD and dive into the world of Linux to see if I can get away from this Windows crap. I know there are different flavors out there, some easier to negotiate than others. What I am looking for is a website for new users. Basically I'd like to be able to do some preliminary research so I can pick out a distribution, install it, and go/learn from there.

Also, I know in the past we've had mirrors to download distributions, do those still exist?

Finally, any advice/thoughts/flames on going about this adventure would be appreciated.

Well, if you are looking for a straight windows replacement I would suggest looking into RedHat or SUSE for your distro. They have some decent user interfaces and installation is pretty easy with both.

Alright cool. I'll read up on those.

I suppose i should have mentioned that, atm, I plan on installing the nix OS on a separate HDD and keeping Windows as is. I plan on using nix for web surfing, listen to music, and instant messaging, all while toying around/breaking/learning the nix OS.

I suppose should mention that I run dual monitors and I would like to continue using both. I am not sure if this will present a problem or not. Do I need to get some graphics drivers from nvidia.com or what? I am completely new to this so if you need more information let me know or simply ignore me, that's cool too.

Thanks in advance.

I would actually advise Ubuntu. It is quite user-friendly, similar to windows in a lot of ways, easy to step into. I have used Suse for a bit, but not RedHat, so I can't comment too much other than Ubuntu was easier than Suse IMO.

Alright, I'll check into that too. Like I said, I just want to jump into something easy and go from there. If I decide I need more options/control and whatnot, I'll go from there.

Welcome to the world of *nix!

Instead telling you what distro you should use, I offer you this instead...
http://www.linuxquestions.org: a forum dedicated to linux problems and people looking for answers.
http://www.google.com/linux: google is your friend, even if you're a penguin
www.nvidia.com: proprietary nvidia drivers to give your spiffy graphics some 3d acceleration.

READ READ and READ SOME MORE!
If you really want to get into linux, then you will do A LOT of reading. There is a shit-ton of documentation for GNU/Linux, and it's all out there on the web. If you have a problem 99% of the time, someone else has had that same problem, and the answer is out there somewhere.

Building/Installing a new kernel
Somewhere along the line, you will need to rebuild your kernel, and/or build drivers. So I highly suggest you learn how to do so.

Learn your XOrg config!
If you want to run dual monitors, this is something you will have to look into. It's not hard, but most people still manage to muck this up.

Pick a window manager you like
A lot of people get into linux, and use the default window manager (kde, gnome, etc etc) that comes with their distrobution of choice. Some window managers are bloated and slow, and new users associate that slowness with linux and or that distrobution. Some people like flashy window managers with all the eye candy, some people like minimalist window managers. It's all up to your preference.

.. that's all I can think of for now.

Oh, and http://www.linuxappfinder.com is useful as well, especially for people new to the game.

FYI, The three main linux distros for desktop use nowadays are:

Ubuntu
http://www.ubuntu.com/

SUSE
http://www.opensuse.org/

Fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Ubuntu seems to be the popular choice nowadays, so I would probably recommend that.

So are all of these freeware?

yep.

Almost anything to do with Linux is freeware, and a lot of it is opensource too

Most of the ISOs are available on the UMR mirror as well. Sometimes they are only 40 or so folders deep.

I'll add another endorsement for Ubuntu. I've been running it on my desktop for several months now and I'm a fan. It's very easy to install and use and there are tons of helpful people on the forums if you run into trouble.

Actually, I recently migrated to Kubuntu, which is the same thing except it uses KDE instead of GNOME. If you don't know what those are yet, they're different desktop environments. I definitely suggest trying out both at some point to see which you prefer.

I'll most defiantly look into several desktop environments.

I'm currently trying to scrounge up a loose HDD around the house. How big of and HDD will I need? Will an old 5-10gb HDD work?

I'd say that 5-10 GB should be alright, but may be pushing it a little bit depending on what distribution you decide on. My Kubuntu installation and all my installed applications totals about 4.5 GB right now. (That's a rough estimate, as I'm not counting any of the configuration stuff in my home folder, but that shouldn't make a huge difference.)

One thing to be wary of is file systems. I assume your current hard drive is NTFS, which is the default Windows XP file system. Since Microsoft won't release details about how NTFS works, it's had to be reverse engineered, which makes writing to NTFS volumes a little sketchy. Reading works pretty much without fail, and it is possible to set up NTFS write support with a little work, but there's some risk involved. I have it set up on my computer and haven't had any problems with it so far, but I try to minimize how much I write to my NTFS drive.

As for Linux file systems, many use ext3 by default, which Windows doesn't support. There is, however, a handy tool which will let you read and write to ext2 partitions from Windows (and therefore ext3 partitions, since ext3 is backward compatible) which can be found here: http://www.fs-driver.org/. Since ext2 is an open format, this should be very stable and safe to use. I haven't had any problems with it and haven't heard of anyone else who has either.

There are a few things to be noted with using that EXT2IFS program. Namely, Linux allows file and folder names that windows does not, such as : characters in the names, trailing period folders, etc. So some of your stuff may disappear if you try to read it on windows. Also, the EXT2IFS program has no character set mapping. It is alpha-numeric ONLY. This means that any files with special characters in their names [foreign words, fancy lettering, etc], will show up as a standard 'unknown character' symbol. Other than that, its a pretty good program. Though I have found that if you are going back and forth a lot, just use the FAT32 fs type instead, it won't hurt much.