I recently got a new HP L2000 laptop, and the stock install of winXP Home has just got to go.

The specs are...

AMD Turion(TM) 64 ML-37 (2.0GHz/1MB L2 Cache)
14.0 WXGA BrightView Widescreen (1280x768)
ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/productivity ports
512MB DDR SDRAM (1x512MB)
60 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive
Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN

I was thinking of trying x86-64 Gentoo since the x86 build of Gentoo that I downloaded and played with for a while seemed pretty nice. I'm not sure what driver support would be like, but I figure it should be better than what's available right now on XP x64. Mostly the laptop will be used while at school for cramming on programming projects. Plenty of dev tools(which seems to be common), support for x86-64 and decent driver support are really the only requirements besides being able to use Cool n Quiet, which I think is more bios dependent. Any other ideas?

Both Fedora and Debian have pretty good 64bit support.

Just go ahead and use Gentoo.

Fedora Core is horrible. It's the reason I almost gave up on linux. I recommend Debian or Slackware, especially Debian.

:: shrugs :: the university I just graduated from has FC2 running on a whole lab of AMD 64s.

I'd say Gentoo. I have yet to have problems on my 64 bit computer. Slackware is not an option since there is no 64 bit version but I think there might be a distro based on slack that is 64 if you wanted to go that route.

You can get a 64-bit version of SUSE over at opensuse.org. I don't have a 64-bit machine, so I can't test it myself, but SUSE has a reputation for being a solid distro with plenty of available packages.

Frankly, any of the distros that have been mentioned are pretty good. If anything will give you trouble, it'll probably be the wide screen and ATI drivers.

Here's how:

http://www.mcargh.net/HP-L2000-Core4.html