greetings gore,

i know its tempting to go online straight away, but you should really go about securing it first. you know, turning off services, av, configuring iptables etc. or have you done that already? i would advise you to make a "go-between" FAT partition. then get everything you need off the net from your windows OS, and put them in the FAT partition. mount the FAT partition in linux to get access to them. if your distro has the NTFS module installed, then you can mount your NTFS partitions as it stands, so you don't need to make another FAT partition.

just thought i'd recomend doing all your surfing with your windowsOS, until you get around to securing linux.