Well - - I've been checking the No OS links - -and - -
 

I might as well pick up a cheaper / better unit here in the depressed Northern Midwest and wipe the drive. It's gonna be cheaper that way. The couple US sites with White Box Laptops are more expensive than running down to the closest Electronics Super Store - - Or even (gasp, hack, cough) Walmart (never thought I'd say that). Now the questions are Toshiba, Dell, Acer, HP, Lenovo. From what I've been pricing, I can get an AMD Turion x64 Duo with 160 to 200 Gig, 2gDDR , CD/DVD/Light Scribe / Wifi/Modem/Ethernet/15.4WS etc for about $700.00 out the door.

Even though I have not contributed in any way but I am happy for you. For me it was (your situation) like a deja-vu. I struggled exactly in the same way with my Acer4520 laptop. After a month of scraping through different forums finally got things in order thanks to a thread on Ubuntu forums. I am currently using Linux Mint,

sound problem
 

Hi

I have a Toshiba Equium AMD 64 x 2, and also had a problem with my sound. However I have solved it in OpenSuse, by updating my ASLA drivers to the latest ones, which have support for our chipset.

I used this info, obviously for suse, but it should give you a good idea of what is required for your distro....

http://en.opensuse.org/AudioTroubleshooting

I have not sorted out my wireless problem yet, but will let you know as soon as I have solved it. My next attempt is to use ndsiwrapper.

good luck with your sound....I had to enable the master sound option in Kmix, as it was set to headphones originally.