Re: XP or Linux
If you choose to stick with Windows, go find a copy of Windows 2000 Pro. Won't cost much at all, and is leagues better than XP. XP is just 2000 + crap - some good stuff. If you play a lot of old DOS games, many might not work under 2000, but then they probably won't all work under XP either. A parition of a few hundred megabytes with win98 installed on it is great for old games that don't work in 2000 or XP.
Debian Linux is good. Great package system for installing software and the libraries they depend on and all.
Linux is quite capable of web surfing and playing videos of any sort. OpenOffice.org provides an office package that is nearly as good as MS Office, except for some of the more advanced macro features of Excel that most Users don't use. Gaming is another issue...
How many modern games do you play? SE4 works using Wine under Linux (with a bit of work... you'll probably want to bug people like Parabolize and Sivran on the #SpaceEmpires IRC channel for help on that). SE5 may or may not work, who knows. Older games tend to be easier to get working with Wine or Cedega than newer games. If nothing else, you can always create a FAT32 partition and install Win 98 on it and boot into it for those games that you can not get working in Linux.
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