I gave up on Linux in 2009: wasted far too much of my life trying to get far too many simple things to work. Initially I liked the learning, but after 3 years I said F this and moved on to Win 7.
As it happens I just resurrected a Presario 2100 for a friend's kid with bits and pieces from the local council e-waste dumpsters:
Upped the ram to 1 gig,
found a 160 gig hard drive 7200 rpm amongst the rubble,
added a wireless card form another dead laptop,
it had a Win XP Home license so I just used my copy of XP Home SP3, everyhting but the ATI display driver worked, 5 minutes on HP's website and I had the ATI driver installed
found some Win Media player codes to enable DVD playback
installed PC Tools Free antivirus.
2 hours of my time and everything works
Can't see myself installing Linux again TBH.
