changing from winxp on pent4 to any linux system?

I am trying to get out of the microsoft world....please can someone help? vista is a bad dream of user-control-access denial. I want to change over and use a different search engine than Google, whose job it seems is to prevent access to web-searches outside their 20 page advancements. I've tried to skip a thousand pages and it has never once let me.
Any thoughts?
Thanks