I am a Linux newbie and never used it before. I'm considering Suse, Xandros and Lindows for my laptop any comparisons, suggestions or warnings? "I know to back up"

I have an old used Gateway (Solo 9100) laptop with a Pentium2, 4-GB, 640k RAM, the system is x86 based physical memory is 191.51mb total and 91.57mb available.

It came with Windows ME, that's been a nightmare. Now the OS is having issues (or is an issue) and I need to replace it. This is my only PC so I want the OS to be fairly painless to use.

My reasons for the above top three are: ease of use and install, MS compatibility (not an absolute but a consideration), Price (Pro/deluxe vs. personal) and Lindows seems to be the only one specifically stating a version for laptops.

Just for consideration what is the most compatible with MS, out of the box and also later udate, install or upload, is it mainly Cross Over Office?


Thanks for any advice in advance folks.

I would have a look at morphix gnome CD. http://morphix.sourceforge.net/. Will boot from CD (of course it's quite slow until you install on hd!), it's free (both as in speech and beer) and comes with OpenOffice, which is to a reasonable extent compatible with msoffice (except msaccess) at document level.
Crossover is actually a way to run a real msoffice executable in a linux environment, it's not an office suite itself. I won't use it on your machine, it would be quite slow!