I haven't installed Redhat 7.1 as yet because I'm unsure about compatiability with hardware. I was thinking about building a new pc and spliting my hard drive into two partitions. My new pc will probably be along the lines of a pentium 3 800mhz or pentium 4 with 128mb ram and a 30-40gb hard drive.

Will there be any problems if I install windows 2000 on the other partition?

Also I would like to get me a laptop but how things look today all laptop come with software bundles so I would have ot format it and start off fresh. will there be any compatiablity problems installing Linux on a dell laptop? Do I have to have to stick ot a specific model? Or will any do?

Most hardware is supported by linux. Since you would be building a computer you can check ahead of time to make sure each part is good. Check the hardware compatibility list at the Redhat web site.

As for a dual boot system, it should work fine on both machines. Install windows first and linux second. Linux doesn't care if there are other OS's, but sometimes windows can get cranky if it's not in complete control. If you install linux second, windows doesn't know that it's not in complete control. Hope this helps.

the one hardware most people find that doesn't work is the video card or modem. if you have a winmodem, you going to have a hard time getting that to work. best thing to do is check out redhat's site, www.redhat.com and or the www.xfree86.org site for video details.
on the laptop, usually dell is pretty friendly in getting linux to work as they are into linux.
check out www.linux-laptops.org for lots of info in getting linux on a laptop.

generally, I'd say that you should have no problems running Linux with your Win2k partner. Linux in general has made drastic advances in compatibility, and I believe if you have fairly common hardware, you will have no problems at all, with the exception of Modem (true modems are completely hardware based, however today's modems that work in Windoze <winmodems> use windows drivers to operate - hence, they may not work in Linux.)
I am currently running Win2k Pro, Win2k AdvSvr, and RH 7.1 on the same disk. After installing Windows, Windows, and then Linux, I added a line in /etc/lilo.conf pointing to my active windows partition, and lilo then hands off the Windoze boot to ntldr PERFECTLY. You should have no problems in that respect.
The one other place you may is that due to some BIOS' limit on Booting past the 1024th Cylinder on a disk (known as the 1024 cylinder limit, or somewhere around 8 GB usually) you may have issues getting the system to boot if your /boot partition comes after this limit in the HDD. If you have a current motherboard/BIOS, you may only get a warning and then the advice from setup to create a boot disk. That is sound advice.