Your best bet is to go to Distro Watch and download the most popular Distro's and install them into a virtual environment and play with each one. Once you find 'the one' you can do a dual boot install next to Windows. I personally don't like to dual boot because I find myself never using one of the installs because it's too much trouble to reboot when I want to switch the OS. Virtual environments (If you have the resources) and KVM's connecting multiple boxes are the way to go imho.
If you are looking for a Linux environment. I liked using Ubuntu KDE, gnome is just to basic for me. Give em a looksee. OpenSuse is also a nice choice.
Good Luck,
Adrian