my Windows is dying

I have Windows XP Pro with all the updates (SP2 or whatever) on a Dell Inspiron 600m, only a year and a half old. A couple weeks ago, I upgraded my RAM from 512mb to 1gb and added a bunch of lightweight programs (while uninstalling bulky counterparts). Suddenly Firefox or some other program would unexpectedly quit for seemingly no reason. Then I started to get the blue screen of death. I would get stop messages plus random tips that a hardware device wasn’t working properly or a newly-installed anti-virus or backup program was creating problems. Since I did install WinBackup (I had a feeling I might be needing to FINALLY do a backup of my machine), I tried uninstalling that (among other software earlier). It is ironic that I’d have to uninstall the one thing which might help me if I did have a computer crash, isn’t it? Well I didn’t have problems after that for about a week. Then the problems started again. I got a blue screen almost daily(one mentioned newly installed memory, I think), until I finally started my computer to find that my profile was corrupt, and so it was logging me(the only admin) under a temporary profile which couldn’t save information. In this situation, all my applications were still accessible, but My Documents, for instance, (being under my profile) were only accessible through a bunch of folders. I tried a bit to fix the situation (there are some answers online to this) but nothing really worked, though I admit I didn’t try too hard. It was time to do something new, something drastic.
This is when I decided that I would setup Ubuntu (a Linux distribution) on my computer. I had been secretly waiting for this (I had a stash of free Ubuntu CD’s ready to go, and I had slight Unix-envy ever since I learned the basics almost a year ago), and the constant Windows problems only pushed me further in that direction.

Now it was only a decision of how to go about it.

Would I erase Windows off my computer completely? Would I partition the drive and do both?

Well, the answer to that question is in my next post!!!!