any suggestions or known problems with this setup would be much appreciated. the only thing i know as of now i need to defrag my windows partition. my setup is as follows 2 partitions one 75 gig and the other is 40 gigs and it is the one with windows...

What model do you have? I've not run Suse on a Compaq. I have an Acer TravelMate & a Dell Inspiron both with Suse 10.2. But my old Compaq Presario is Kubuntu 6.04 which is a bit slow - only 96Mb RAM. The only problem was the modem on the Compaq is a Winmodem which is partially software and finding a driver was difficult. I eventually got it to run properly with a linmodem driver.

Suse 10.2 works well on laptops. You may need ndiswrapper to install the wireless card drivers, and 915resolution to get the display working at the right resolution if it is widescreen.

Have a look at the HCL listing and post your queries in the Laptop section. I got a lot of help there when I started.

One tip I found with dual booting with XP is to put the GRUB bootloader on the MBR. Also get yourself a GParted Live CD to do the partitioning and use as a rescue disk. Version 0.3.3 does NTFS resizing with no problems so far.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

my laptop's chipset is AMD Turion64 @1.50 ghz, graphic card is ATI radeon xpress 200m , wireless is broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN, not really concerned with modem or much else really and will that gparted live cd work on my laptop's x86_64 architecture? and if you had the choice is it eaiser to have windows installed first than install linux or linux than windows?