Thought I might revive this thread since I decided to wipe my laptop of anything Micro$oft in favour of a linux distro.
I have a copy of suse 8, wanted to download 9.3 but even on my 1mb bband it was quoting over 7hrs download (3.1gb) - so instead I went for what seems to be the in-distro of the moment - Ubuntu (700Mb).
And wow, what a sleek installation, what a nice interface and a very very usable system - and so far (fingers crossed) my laptop is not crashing like it was before (probably due to a trojan or something).
In short, if you're looking for an easy way in to Linux try Ubuntu - more info here:
http://distrowatch.com/
Download links:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu