Is there any place on this site that walks a person through the basics from purchasing a unit to setting it up to getting it to work, etc? Thanks for you assistance and patience!
The RPi is a "bare-bones" computer and you must provide the accessory bits to make it work. I am not sure about
this site but one such walk through is
http://lifehacker.com/the-always-up-to- ... 1781419054 and it looks to be as accurate as any. There are a lot of places where you can buy the RPi: Adafruit (USA), Pi Hut (UK), even Amazon at a somewhat inflated price and many others. Avoid far-east and auction sites and stick with reputable authorized dealers for the RPi and its bits.
The Lifehacker article has a list of what you need to buy and what to do with it when you get it as well as some proposed uses you can try. If, as you say, you are an old windows user, fear not but do not expect it to be a cheap duplicate of a windows laptop. It actually is a bit more powerful by virtue of its GPIO ports, especially in terms of interacting with the real world. I have 6 RPi's, some doing daily jobs for me and this one which is my every day desktop by preference (I have several "higher performance" x86 machines sitting turned off most of the time).