[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

That reminds me, will Linux present special problems on a laptop?

You betchyou!

[zeugma]

That reminds me, will Linux present special problems on a laptop?

You betchyou!

That's funny, it installed just fine on both my wife's HP laptop and my Dell laptop. The only real problem was wireless configuration, but there is great documentation on that these days.

Publius, I'd recommend that you download the Knoppix CD and try booting the laptop from it. This should give you a reasonable idea of how well Linux will detect the hardware.