where too start?

Lockwood

I have been a long term windows user, who switched to Apple this year and was amazed how simple they are.. I guess this is where my interested OS's started...

I have two main issues or projects, First Updating my old XP desk top, second would be uppdating my very old Gateway solo laptop which runs windows 98 and crashes constantly..

So where would you start? I mainly just surf the web. I have must have down loaded countless distributions that say they will work but so far no dice..

Lockwood

The desktop has a 1g of ram and pentium 4 processor, the lap top has 512mg of ram and pentium 3 processor. And thanks for your help.