If you check out the Perl manual pages, I seem to recall that somewhere in the introductory material is a very short (<20line) script that facilitates interactive use of the Perl interpreter. Not sure how good it is.
In response to thechristelegacy's original question; why not set up a dual boot arrangement? Partition off a good chunk of your machine's hard disk for Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever's your poison) and you can have both. I've got a setup like that on our main machine - 75Gb or so for Linux, 5Gb for Windows. You can merrily run a full installation of Linux on less than 10Gb, though.
One catch is, if it's WinXP you've got, good old FIPS can't resize NTFS partitions, so you'll need a better partition manager (like Partition Magic) to resize the existing partition if you want to do it nondestructively (i.e. avoid having to set up XP again from scratch).
My Mum's computer illiterate, though, and within a couple of weeks of switching her to SuSE Linux she was happier than she was after years of using Windows. She could still access all her Office documents using StarOffice (now OpenOffice) and she felt more comfortable about using email with KMail than with Outlook, and the 'web with Netscape rather than IE. Maybe your Mum just needs to try something new?
