Hi!

Very new to unix stuff, and this is my first post to the forum. I'm pretty sure I know enough to know I know nothing, so please be patient with me and don't laugh too hard.

Ok, I've got an old computer and a laptop - the old computer was bought in the mid 90's it's still running windows 95(and something called "acer") it's got the origional harddrive with 8gb of storage, pentium 1 processor, the computer crashed multiple times a few years ago because of virus(es) it was reformatted and fixed and finally I got the laptop(windowsXP professional) and the old computer has just been sitting. I need to use it because my parents paid over $2000 when it was new but I really don't see anything I can do with it without a lot of trouble so here's my idea:

Replace the hard drive with 2 new hard drives(already checked, it's do-able) giving me a terabyte of storage, download a unix OS on it(redhat maybe?) and ftp software, get a dedicated cable modem for it and use it as a server/dedicated storage for my music, pictures, video, and school files and I want to be able to use it some of the time to learn more about unix and how to use it because so far I've only used windows.

1) Which unix-like software should I choose that would be easiest to do what I want to do with it?

2) Is such an old computer going to give me problems storing video and music files that I just don't know enough to know about?

3) Is it true what I've read about Unix systems being immune to viruses and such, and that I won't need any traditional virus software?

4) Do you have any tips or information or links to point me to that would give me more info that would help me ask the questions I need to ask?

Thanks.

Thank you - I've got a lot of reading to do but you've helped quite a bit who knows how long it would have taken me otherwise to learn about the BIOS thing.