I went through the whole SuSe thing last week and it went famously. If you buy the package distro, with the cds and the manual and the cool blue sticker, it tells you what all to do. And the box was only US$30 (discounted to US$20 at Best Buy).
If you've got Windows 2000, though, you might run into some serious problems. Find out ASAFP if your machine has an NTFS partition, or a FAT32 partition. If it's NTFS, you're going to need a lot more than a sandwich and a soda. You're going to have to reinstall windows first.