If you're looking for a light distro, Minime is a great choice. The full-scale distro it's based off of is PCLinuxOS, which is a great way to get into Linux, especially for someone moving over from Wintendo. I've run that for 3 years on the lappy that my new Macbook is replacing and found it's hardware detection and setup to be the easiest of any Linux distro, at least on the laptop. I've also been running Ubuntu Hardy on the desktop. I tried Mepis, Mint, Sabayon, Mandriva, and eLive and kept going back to those two.