Just an update for anyone curious.
Time to swap to the new hard disk: 5 minutes, tops (it's an old eMachines box and IMHO pretty nicely built in terms of the case and internal drive sled).
Time to instal SUSE Linux: about 20 minutes or so, including us reading the dialog boxes even though we mostly accepted default settings.
After install, Linux booted fine, and the few apps we opened seemed good. There was a little confusion setting up the net connection (apparently not necessary to do it in the Linux config since the necessary settings were already in the router... so it was working even though I didn't know it at first).
Maybe another 20 minutes to set up the root acct, the user acct, and configure a few other small things.
Two problems DID come up:
For some reason the keyboard got mapped as German (?) despite the fact that I SAW it say U.S. in the prefs during setup... therefore shift-2 didn't produce an @, making setting up the email a bit difficult. Has been corrected w/help from their tech support. Oddly, the shift-2 DID produce the expected @ in a word app, just not in either of the email apps. Strange.
The other issue (not yet resolved) is that the machine doesn't really shut down properly. You can log out of root and into another user w/no trouble, but when you choose to do a full shut-down the system looks like it's doing it but never actually does... requiring the power to be shut off manually, which thus far doesn't seem to have upset the OS on later restart. I'll have to look into this next Monday.
My impressions: for $36, the value received is amazing: a full (and good-looking) Operating System, WITH a complete set of apps (office, a couple browsers, a couple email clients, gimp, a digicam tool, a scanner app, video editor, music tools, etc...... lots more I didn't look at yet... basically at least one of everything). The interface (KBD, Gnome, something like that I think) reminded me more of OSX on a Mac than it did of Windows or Unix (on SGIs). It sort of seemed like a whole new computer.... none of that circa-1981 40-column DOS text always lurking in the bg somewhere on Windows boot-up... the interface text and graphics looked totally contemporary: clean, smooth and inviting. To be frank, I wish that I could install a Red Hat distribution (or something similar... a power-user's flavor of Linux) on my own Athlon box... dealing with that G-D damn Windows setup wizard, and all the mysterious problems I've had with it is a royal PITA... Linux looks like an OS a fella could actually be enthusiastic about, like MacOS... something you use because you WANT to, not simply because you HAVE to (as is the case with me and Win2K). And it seemed FAST, even on my friend's old 1.5gig economy box.
IMHO, even with my very brief peek at the world of Linux thus far, unless you choose Windows in order to run the latest games (or you've already invested too much time in pirating Windows/Windows apps and don't want to hunt for Linux stuff that's close to free) anyone who has a PC and DOESN'T switch it to Linux is making life much harder for themselves than necessary.