A friend of mine brought in his laptop today so I could check it out and buy it from him. I couldn't get it to boot linux from a cd, though. Needless to say, no deal.

It'll boot linux. What did you try? Just the regular ubuntu live CD? Were there any errors?

I thought I only had DSL and Puppy with me. Those 2 didn't work. His computer wouldn't even try to boot them (even manually selecting cdrom from the boot menu). After I posted this, I saw I had ubuntu 6.06 and luit linux with me. The computer wasn't beefy enough for ubuntu. Luit worked fine, but it's by far the lamest distro I've ever used.

But... the computer was a piece of crap, anyway. Even if it would have booted DSL, I don't think I would have got it. The screen didn't stay up right. The screen also would randomly turn off (making you press the little button to turn off the screen when the lid closes). 128mb of ram, 20gb hd, and a 747mhz proc. I really just wanted something for taking notes and surfing the net, but I think my standards are a little higher than that thing.

the screen is the killer. I used to run XP on a 500mhz PIII and 128MB RAM and 20GB HD (it is 256MB RAM now), and it did run Ubuntu (though with the piss poor graphics in it, could get ubuntu to display things too well, that I went back to Windows for now on it).

700mhz is plenty for Ubuntu - do remember you aren't dealing with the bloat of windows here

yeah, but 128mb of RAM isn't for the live cd.

no, but you are more then fine on the alternate disk there.

Yeah, but I was just testing it out to see if I wanted to buy it. I'm not going to overwrite his XP partion and then not buy it.