In or around Baton Rouge, call Will Hill at 769-1409.
For $40 and hardware costs, I'll put your choice of GNU/Linux on your computer in Baton Rouge. I offer:
I'm also an authorized AOpen hardware vendor and can provide you with any hardware you from fancy cube systems to economy boxes with hard to beat local factory support.
Why? Because free software works.
I'm most familiar with and recommend Debian. Red Hat and Suse offer support programs you might be interested in. Debian provides many of those support features free of charge.
I recommend dual booting. This makes your other software available when you turn your computer on. You don't have to lose anything but disk space to try out free software.
For your $40, I'll provide you with a working operating system and basic software, such as a graphical user interface, browser, email clients, printing service, text editors and image manipulation programs. It works like this
For the price of a phone call, I'll be happy to size up your situation.
Chicken? No problem. Try a Live CD that runs without bothering your hard drive.