[Belenar]

It really depends on how much time you are willing to invest.

If you want an almost "plug 'n play" solution, you would be better off with a pre-compiled package based linux-distribution. Examples are: SuSE, Mandrake, RedHat, ...
Most of them have nice, graphical installers, so they shouldn't give you any trouble to install.

If you wish to gain performance and if you want to learn more about linux on the long term, you should play with one of those distro's for a while until you feel confortable using it. Then you can switch to a home-compiled solution like Gentoo. This will give you a system that is tailored to your needs and your hardware. Needless to say that this takes some tinkering and won't come right out of the box. But in the long term, you'll learn _alot_ about the internal workings of the OS and you'll be certain to have the _exact_ system you need.

On the partitioning: I always get the mandatory swap, root (/) and boot (/boot) partitions (/boot isn't strictly necessary, but I'd advise you to get it anyway).
I also have the user homedirs (/home) on a seperate partition and an extra hd mounted on /share. This way I can mess up my OS and not lose my user data...
I'd also advise you to take double of your ram size as swap space...