I have been lurking for awhile and am beginning to sense your frustration.
First on a replacement for XP. It is a good idea to replace XP with a Linux distribution, but which one is always a tough to figure out. Everybody has a favourite and their recommendation may not be good for you.
I think that you probably want a popular distribution with good support. The latest and the greatest may not necessarily be the best choice. You may not want a fancy interface if it is going to slow you down, so you have to consider your hardware and the specs of the desktop environment. In short it is complex task.
Mint is often recommended to newbies and there are good reasons to choose it and not choose it. It is based on Ubuntu, but it has its own desktop environments. Some like them and some don't. It is probably good to try a few out by running them in a VM, from a usb stick (if you can boot from usb) or from a bootable disk (without installing anything).
There are a couple of problems with choosing Mint. It has no upgrade tool so upgrading it (which becomes necessary as support runs out) is complicated matter of editing your sources list as root. This is not a newbie skill. The other problem is that Mint is dependent on Ubuntu and Ubuntu is making following them increasingly a challenge, so at some point Mint will probably be forced to spin off and be in flux. All of Mint is also dependent on GNOME which is making as many flaky choices as Ubuntu lately. Their developers are good, but this will be much extra work and they are spread thinly enough now.
A better choice for a newbie XP user might be to choose a distribution closer to the Ubuntu tree, such as Xubuntu or Lubuntu. Xubuntu is Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop environment. It is faster than anything Mint produces, it depends solely on Ubuntu repositories and it has an upgrade tool. It also has a closer Windows look and feel than Mate or Cinnamon. If you want to run even faster you could choose Lubuntu which is the LXDE desktop.
Choices outside the Ubuntu/ Debian tree might be Mageia, and PCLinuxOS. Ones to avoid would be Fedora (love it, but not newbie friendly), openSuSE (not as newbie friendly) and Debian itself (which can be a nightmare to get working multimedia and proprietary drivers).
If your computer can boot from usb in the BIOS settings then you can install Unetbootin in Windows and run it and it will take care of downloading the ISO and installing it on an empty usb key (2 or 4 GBs is usually enough).
If you want to download the ISO and burn it to CD that works too. Just download ISORecorder and it will open ISOs and record them.
or alternatively: https://cdburnerxp.se/help/Data/burn-iso
There are several other programmes that will do this.
If your computer cannot boot from usb, you can force it to using a bootable CD that then accesses the usb key.
Getting Linux onto your computer is not difficult. Choosing the distribution that is right for you is much harder. To that end, I would try several distributions including Mint and the *buntus. I would also look outside the Debian based ones to a couple of simple RPM based distribution. Run each one from CD/DVD or usb key.
If you are really up for a challenge and your hardware is beefy enough I would suggest installing VirtualBox and trying to run ISOs directly from the VM.
Whatever your decision, there is a great community for each distribution that can help you.
Roy
(To all, I did not go away, I just shrunk to the background and have been lurking. Hi!)
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