my laptop (hp pavillion ze4400) has mobile AMD Athlon XP2200+, 1.79 GHz, 1 GB ram upgraded from 512MB to max 1 GB (but when pull up stats says it has 960 MB), 40 GB rom (but when pull up stats says it has 37.2 GB ROM), it has USB ports, it has a 2.4 GHz 54 Mbps wireless card to stick in the side should I need to go online, I use open office, have just discovered there are accounting programs out there similar to Quicken I might like to use, not sure how to tell which DVD player it has, but it does have one; I use an external seagate backup. I mainly keep bookkeeping stuff on it, a few pics, and occasionally play solitaire or such on it. It is "leave the state a hurricane is coming unit", and it came with windows 95, then had to change to windows XP, but windows 7 does not seem the answer to change to now (I don't think it would run well at all on that OS), so friends (none of us are experts on computer stuff) suggested looking into linux because like open office, it never goes away or becomes unsupported. As to computer doings and lingo, I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, but I'm not the dimmest either. Any suggestions?

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux - Laptop and Netbook and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

The choice of distro (linux distribution) is a personal thing, most of the major ones will provide a live cd image (won't install on your pc unless you tell it to) that you can download, burn to cd then boot on and have a play around with. I recommend you try a few and when you find one you like, download the install iso and install onto your machine, that way you'll still have a functioning machine while you're deciding.

hth

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