Had enough with windows....going insane.....need advice

[David Csercsics <kajarii@shaw.ca>]

Ok so I've tried 5 versions of windows all of which crash quite a bit no
matter how much you mess with them. And dang it I liked linux a heck of a
lot when I was able to use it. I have a set of SuSE cd's here but the
trouble is that suse-blinux no longer detects my braille display (had to get
a new one recently because I needed a portable braille display.) so I cannot
install that on this machine. I have a braille lite 40 here now. I don't
really think it matters to me which linux I decide to use. Got some
questions though. I've got a 45 GB hd sitting in this box with an athlon 4
chip and 768 mb of ram. How should I partition my drive for linux? What
would be the easiest distro to hack a boot disk for so that I can install
without sighted help as I don't trust a lot of people with my computer and
most of the people I know would faint if they had to install anything other
than windows so it looks like I'll be doing it myself. Also is there a way
to read ms word and excel documents under linux? I get a lot of those and it
seems saving things as plain text is a foreign concept to a lot of people. I
assume that I would have to sacrifice ocr for a reliable operating system.
By that I mean that there is ocr for windows but the os crashes too often
and I am forever reinstalling but I've treid to put up with it because I
haven't been able to get a dual boot to work at all. All that seems to
happen when I try to dual boot si windows becomes twice as unstable. So am I
correct that there is no useable ocr for linux? Any
comments/suggestions/advice/whatever would be greatly appreciated at this
point as I'm going to slowly go insane and I've got a huge programming
project I've gotta get started on (studying computer science in college) and
I need to use my computer for a lot of other things and I really can't
afford to waste a lot of time and torture myself with instability. The lack
of ocr is probably going to hurt but I suppose that I can figure something
out. I should also point out taht I have a fast internet connecdtion and a
cd burner and half a dozen different linux iso's sitting on my drive. Oh,
almost forgot, I don't have a hardware synth. If you need more details about
my setup you can always ask. Thanks for taking the time to read this and not
pressing the delete button already. :) I will quit before I cause more
trouble here and I will go back to insanity for a bit before I freeze up
again.