I, too, thought about using git and github to host my code, but then found that github is free for open-source projects only and the generally accepted notion looked like git was more powerful but required more time to learn. This also lead to me try out Mercurial.

And the tutorials at http://www.hginit.com really made it look easy to get into.

As far as disciplining yourself to continually check into version control, maybe I'm too paranoid, but I used to always find myself creating copies of files before making big changes to them, just to be safe, or commenting out code instead of deleting it, because I might need to reference it again.

This is exactly I am (almost) right now. My code has a lot of previous code I've just commented instead of deleting, just because I thought I might need them again, or the new code wont work. Like, when I'm trying to do the same thing using more optimized solution. I guess using version control helps me get out of this habit. :)

Thanks for your reply. :)