I can’t say this enough.  When you first are moving from Windows to Linux, you need to take everything on your hard drive that is irreplaceable and store it someplace.  This could be on an external hard drive or burned to DVDs or CDs.  It really doesn’t matter what you use.  The good thing about external drives is that you can rewrite to them.  DVDs and CDs are a little more portable and give you a permanent archive.

Alright, now what do you save?  Well if you have multiple users on an account, you’re going to have to repeat this for each and every account.  I am moving from Windows XP, but most Windows OS are similar (except for Vista, but it’s not very hard to find the User’s folders).

All your users will be in C:\Documents and Settings\.  The letter drive might differ, but that shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.  Copy the folders called All Users and whatever your username is (and each one that isn’t default or administrator) to your backup medium.  This might take a long time depending on what you all have.  Actually if you wanted to save some space, you could go through each of the profiles and save only the Desktop folder and My Document folder.  This should cover most everything you have on your PC.  You might have things stored elsewhere on the hard drive, so make sure you check those things as well.  Only you would know where your porn collection is!

Ok, so now you have everything backed up.  It’s time to move on to selecting a distro!