Well, pretty much with any distro, you will be able to find system monitoring tools that tell you everything that you want to need. Which packages these are kinda depends on your desktop environment.
The vast majority of users are probably going to tell you to use Mint or Ubuntu....i personally wouldn't wish that on anyone. I absolutely abhor Ubuntu, and, vis-a-vis, Mint. I'm a Gentoo Guy, but I wouldn't recommend that to a beginner. Compiling everything from source the first time is a great way to scare people away. For a die-hard windows user, i would recommend KDE as your Desktop Environment, not only for its similarities to the Windows GUI but because you can learn alot about the guts of a linux system by mucking around with KDE. I guess a good beginners distro would be Fedora 10 if you want a fancy pantsy Graphical installation tool (or maybe OpenSuSe, but I really don;t like them personally). Anoter option (and a little more scary for a beginner) is Slackware with its completely console-based install. it really gives you a good base without allowing much latitude for you to completely screw everything over.
or dual booting, always install your Microsoft OS first. If not, windows will treat the Linux distros like red-headded stepchildren and not only completely ignore them, but try to beat the filesystems in the head with an ugly stick.
Determine what partitioning scheme you want to use, and install your first distro with a live cd that has a graphical partitioning tool (the Fedora 10 tool is very nice and intuitive). Split them up according to how big you want them to be (with a 160GB, I would personally use 4x 40GB). Don't make your swap partition too large, you have plenty of RAM IMHO (512mb of swap per distro should be more than enough). After you install your first *nix, you can install the rest of them with their various LiveCDs or what have you.
As far as using a pensrive. There's a ton of tutorials out there that explain it, and due to the length of the process, I really don't want to have to type out all that code. I hate to sound crass, but google is your friend my friend. Every distribution, if it can be run from a pendrive, will have a tutorial on their site on how to do it.
As for the multimedia drive, use FAT as your filesystem. Linux doesn't play nice with NTFS.
The vast majority of users are probably going to tell you to use Mint or Ubuntu....i personally wouldn't wish that on anyone. I absolutely abhor Ubuntu, and, vis-a-vis, Mint. I'm a Gentoo Guy, but I wouldn't recommend that to a beginner. Compiling everything from source the first time is a great way to scare people away. For a die-hard windows user, i would recommend KDE as your Desktop Environment, not only for its similarities to the Windows GUI but because you can learn alot about the guts of a linux system by mucking around with KDE. I guess a good beginners distro would be Fedora 10 if you want a fancy pantsy Graphical installation tool (or maybe OpenSuSe, but I really don;t like them personally). Anoter option (and a little more scary for a beginner) is Slackware with its completely console-based install. it really gives you a good base without allowing much latitude for you to completely screw everything over.
or dual booting, always install your Microsoft OS first. If not, windows will treat the Linux distros like red-headded stepchildren and not only completely ignore them, but try to beat the filesystems in the head with an ugly stick.
Determine what partitioning scheme you want to use, and install your first distro with a live cd that has a graphical partitioning tool (the Fedora 10 tool is very nice and intuitive). Split them up according to how big you want them to be (with a 160GB, I would personally use 4x 40GB). Don't make your swap partition too large, you have plenty of RAM IMHO (512mb of swap per distro should be more than enough). After you install your first *nix, you can install the rest of them with their various LiveCDs or what have you.
As far as using a pensrive. There's a ton of tutorials out there that explain it, and due to the length of the process, I really don't want to have to type out all that code. I hate to sound crass, but google is your friend my friend. Every distribution, if it can be run from a pendrive, will have a tutorial on their site on how to do it.
As for the multimedia drive, use FAT as your filesystem. Linux doesn't play nice with NTFS.
