[Nottingham] Network neophyte

[Michael Leuty]

I'd be grateful for a word of advice from you expert chappies, please.

I'm occasionally asked to take a look at the network in our church 
office, which consists of a peer to peer network of two Win98 and one 
Win2k machines, connected to the internet via an ADSL line. The ADSL 
box is set up to act as a DHCP server for the network.

The whole thing runs appallingly slowly and I daresay is infected with 
Lord knows how much malware of various types.

One option would be to reinstall Windows on the machines, but I am 
looking at the possibility of converting them all to a desktop-friendly 
version of Linux such as Mandrake or Fedora.

My question is - how simple would it be to set up networking? We don't 
want anything grand, just some shared directories and possibly also 
printer sharing. Will it all just work "out of the box" with each PC 
picking up its IP address from the DHCP server in the ADSL box. Or 
would I need to do a lot of tweaking (which would probably be beyond 
me)?

-- 
Michael Leuty
Nottingham, UK