I bought this laptop 2nd hand off ebay, and immediately took Windows 98 off and put Mandrake 9.2 on. All the devices were detected flawlessly, no problems.

I'm not running KDE or Gnome but fluxbox and it runs like a dream. I wouldn't attempt any major graphics work on it, or expect it to load large documents (ala OpenOffice ones) quickly. But once the document is loaded the machine is able to perform without any delays.

The screen display is fine, no problems with the graphics (running at 1024x768) and the sound is fine aswell. It's about 4 years old the laptop and as you can tell I'm particularly happy with this purchase considering it's still going strong! A bit weighty compared to todays standards but we can't have everything. Perhaps the only major downfall is the lack of USB2 support but considering the age of it that's understandable. Oh, and don't expect any Linux support from NEC on their website, it's all Microsoft and H/W (which to be fair IS pretty good).

All in all an enjoyable marriage between this laptop and Linux.

Thanks for the reply, which was what I was hoping for. I didn't want to start an install and then find the hardware wasn't supported, as I have no disc to reinstall Windows again if it fails. It's only for the wife just to try out, really. She has never used a computer before so it should be just as easy for her to learn Linux as it would Windows, starting from scratch. She just decided she'd like to try computing at 66, probably just sending emails and looking things up on the web. Windows 98 on this Versa seems terribly slow, but I suppose thats because I'm used to my AMD64 rig with 2gb of RAM. I'm just hoping that Linux speeds it up somewhat. At least it hasn't cost me anything as I got it given.

I'll try one the live cd's to start to see if that sees any problems and then if everything looks favourable give it a go.

Thanks again for your help.

The only problem so far is I can't get it to boot from a bootable disk and I've tried several, they work on my other system. I set it in the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM but it just boots up from the hard drive. I seem to be stumped, I don't have a manual for it and can't find any info from NEC, it's probably too old to carry on supporting, shame really. I'll still keep searching but it isn't looking good