As a completely different approach (depending on what you really want to do), you might want to consider
Cygwin
If all you want to do is be able to run standard unix/linux commands and experiment with them, then this could be a far less resource intensive task. This will allow you to use all the standard commands (find, ls, tar, awk, grep, perl, ...) from the Windows command line. To do this, all the commands are built to be true Windows executables. As such, you do not have the overhead of running 2 complete operating systems simultaneously. You can even run the X-Windows System that can integrate seamlessly with the Windows view, so your X applications appear as native Windows applications.
The one thing Cygwin is not good for is running native Linux applications (especially graphical applications) "out of the box". For example, if one of your friends suggested you try
Tux Racer, it will not work under Cygwin (however there is a Microsoft Windows version of it, so you don't really need to try to run it under Cygwin). So far I have not found any commands that are not available under Cywin or that don't have a native Windows version.
