I have a 4 years old Acer Travelmate 8000 which I was hoping would increase performance if I replaced WinXP with Linux. I want to use this laptop for multimedia in my living room, by connecting it to the TV and Hifi system.

I am new to Linux and started trying out Ubuntu since it seem to be a popular distro. Well, it freezes during startup or shortly after. I then tried Kubuntu, switching from GNOME to KDE.... and the same thing happens.

Then I tried Linux Mint, a distro I think is based on Ubuntu, and it worked the whole weekend. But on monday (of course), the same thing happens, the computer hangs every time I try to start it up.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Is there something with my hardware that rejects these distros. Does anyone have any idea which distro I can try to avoid this problem.

I am so close to reinstalling WinXP... please help

You could try disabling kernel features on the boot command line. If you can see a boot menu then you may be able to edit the boot command line. If your Linux installation disk uses GRUB then you may be able to press the escape key then the e key when you see the boot menu. Then you could add parameters to disable features. Some of the most helpful in this situation would disable the ACPI, API, and USB.
An example line would look something like this.
Here is a place to start for Ubuntu.

https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/install...oot-parms.html

Have you run an extended memory test, just to see if you have memory errors?

This is a known problem. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/587213

Blessings,
Shahar