Source Control In Netbeans - Of SVN and Git

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
OK, so I have Netbeans all setup and debugging and my custom code folding defaults setup and such, and it works well. I've managed to setup Git with nbgit plugin and add my code and it seems to work great - but I can't figure out how to branch the bleepin' thing, which is of course kind of one of the big points of having source control.

With SVN I haven't fared as well, I somehow managed to add...a directory. No files, just a directory.

Has anyone used either of these inside netbeans and could point me to a good learning resource as I can't afford to spend days figuring out if it's a waste of time or time well spent.

Anyone found it better just to use external tools rather than let netbeans do it? I develop on Windows (Vista, ugh) and deploy to linux, but a tool that just works on windows wouldn't kill me.