You will be amazed to know that my computer-little-literate homemate, who is a traveling salesman on the road 6 days a week with his notebook, turned to Linux in 60 minutes after a system crash. He did not know it is customer's responsibility to back-up personal data, and to create Windows re-install cd from a utility it was hidden in his PC. He came to me asking for an XP disc, he had the license on the label, but, didn't have one, so...
I installed one very user-friendly Linux distro on its secondary partition, in about an hour.
From that very day, he's reading old data straight from the unbootable but not lost original NTFS partition, and doing his email, fax, voip, spreadsheet, picture handling, music listening and some games. He said his PC did not perform this fast even the day he picked it up from the shop... Please world, stop with FUD, just open you mind and try out. M$ has done (and still doing) a great job of bringing the PC down to the housemaid and retired elders, but it is not the only way.