[linux-laptop] Installing Linux on a Dell Laptop

[John "bKT" Bellone]

My parents have been having the delightful problems that any normal, 
computer unsavvy, user would have. With the fact that I have little 
brothers that always love to download programs and see what they do 
(which you know exactly what happens!) I have been fortunate enough to 
never get a virus on the system (AVG does a great job). But the laptop 
did run slow.

It's not the best laptop, a Dell Inspirion 2560C (Celeron) with 128MB of 
ram and a 20GB hdd. I got a hold of a copy of Linspire 5.0 from a friend 
that wasn't using his and just today installed it. I was very surprised 
that everything worked properly (wireless internet took a few minutes of 
tweaking, WEP wasn't working but I didn't want to spend a few hours 
problem solving it) and it came with everything they would use (Minus 
Firefox).

It just runs godawfully slow. From the boot screen it takes at least a 
minute or two to get to the user login, and then another minute to get 
the desktop. I didn't think that X was that slow, and in fact, a clean 
installation of Linspire ran slower than the year old installation of 
Windows XP Home. The battery power is also being drained (which isn't a 
big problem). I was wondering if there was a better flavor for me to try?

I see on linux-laptops.net that most people were using Redhat 9.2 on my 
laptop, and I am currently downloading Fedora Core 3 (because I couldn't 
find Redhat 9.2 on their page, they make a good way of hiding it!). I 
love linux, they don't mind it as long as everything works (Internet, 
Office, Mail) but they don't want to wait 3 minutes for Open Office to 
open a Word or Excel document.

Any suggestions?

--John