I have been given (bless her) my daughters old etbook. A Samsung N130. Few years old, running XP and sloooooooow as anything.
My idea is to format the HD (it is partioned, not sure if that matters) and then install a free OS. Possibly Android? or is there something better. I really do not want to spend any real cash on this thing, it will not be a main 'puter, only used for surfing,

And any guidance on how to go about the change would be handy, or places suitable for a PC moron to use.

Cheers and TIA
clive

I always find that for general surfing and browsing that you cant beat Ubuntu and I've never had any issues with it making old machines work a little faster, you can do a dual boot so that you can pick which OS you want to run meaning you can keep windows as a back up

http://www.ubuntu.com/

HTH

Sheep

Had a dig about.
Has anybody views on android? thinking that as I have a (very) basic grasp of it from my phone and a tablet, it may be a good idea (no disrespect to linux users) for me? It appears there is a microsoft office app that is free too. Which may be useful? Not sure about flash player though, that doen't happen on android.

Andriod isn't really a desktop system , you need a Linux system distro tailored to desktop use by a user new to Linux. There are literally dozens of such distro the most suitable are listed here Link to DistroWatch Top 10 Page

Mint is the most popular these days it was started by one guy because he found the huge Ubuntu project didn't have a version that was easy for a beginner to set up as a direct replacement for a desktop Windows system.

PcLinuxOS is also very easy to setup, it tends to lag behind Mint and Ubuntu because the project concentrates on producing a stable version and new versions are only released once a year.

Just done it to my sons left over Samsung N120. I gave up on XP and installed Crunchbang linux. It was installed from a usb stick
and was pretty painless. It is now fairy rapid and perfect for use as a garage laptop. Wifi worked straight away and provided you
are prepared to adjust to a new O/S its quite easy to run. (Typing this on an old Sony Vaio running Bodhi Linux and the performance
difference between Linux and XP is really marked).

Treat yourself to an Ssd from ebuyer.com. You only need a 32g one which is about £30.
It will go so much faster - a lot of your problem is your hard disk is tired which is one of the main reasons why it's so slow.

I just bought a new laptop and the first thing I did was put in a SSD and its blisteringly fast and won't fragment.