Did i do the right thing

i recently got myself a fairly cheap laptop, if i said the specs youd laugh =P in american dollars it was around 500-600, anyway it was one of those laptops with a recovery partian on the hard drive to make a new installation cd as it came with none, fortunatly i have an official windows xp home disc

now my question is

Did i do the right thing wiping the drive clean, reason being, in its commercial state, it was full of shit like AOL instalations, etc, this is how it came with new, and other device driver shit that i dont need that was slowing it down

now it runs quicker, did i do a normal thing or a retarded thing?

You did the right thing if the first thing you did after wiping it was to install Linux.