It's not a good idea to change the operating system of your machine as soon as you find any trouble. The cause may be other than the O.S. itself, for example, a defective hardware could crash entirely the machine. Moreover, some buggy software or hardware driver other than O.S. may be responsible for the failure.
If you wanted a stable, reliable and less resource consuming O.S., Linux is the recommended option. Linux used to be less friendly to the average user, but this is no longer true.
Canonical is making a great effort to make Ubuntu really user friendly, thus anyone could use this O.S. without difficult nowadays. In my opinion Linux is better for basic user (who uses the computer mainly for text typing and web browsing) because it's less prone to crash, to be messed up by inexperienced user and to be attacked by
malwares.
The problem of Linux is its smaller number of users, incompatibilities in some hardware and softwares that don't run outside Windows. If gaming was your main intended use, Windows can't be avoided.
I'm only going to play C&C95, even then it runs under WINE, also, i would just use Wubi to install linux.