Sorry, when I said now, I meant because it worked with my last laptop, never with this laptop.

And I'm starting to think I may just go back to Vista. I'm going to try a 32 bit Fedora 9 install, then, if that doesn't work, I think I might try Knoppix or go back to Vista.

Vista---yes, I've heard that it is pretty much trouble-free, does not eat a lot of resources, etc.....

Your choice: We can help get things working or you can go back to a comfort zone..

Well, running a system with 4 Gb of memory and 2.1 GHz processor, I've had no slowdown in Vista. Also, I've never had a problem with security on Windows, especially with Vista. It's never crashed.

I would love to use Linux though because I like the software choices better and the amount of customization. I think I'm going to try to install Fedora 9 32 bit version later tonight. If it doesn't work, I am going to keep trying, but I don't have a lot of free time right now to work on my computer with all the homework I have to do, so I'd like to have more trouble-free (it really is) operating system right now. And it would be stupid to use an operating system that genuinely doesn't work well on my computer, when I have one that works extremely well already.

Sort of funny side note: I just tried to open OpenOffice and it took about 7 seconds to start up, whereas it only took Powerpoint about a second to open and start up in Vista.

Almost 50 years ago, in our quaint little motorcycle repair shop, we had a saying: "If it works, it's OK." Motorcycles have changed hugely in those 50 years, but the basic principle has not.

We had another saying--motivated largely by the vagaries of repairing British bikes from the 40s and 50s: "Get a bigger hammer." Not sure if this last one is going to help you......

Update:

I tried installing OpenSuse 11.0 and couldn't get past the first piece of text (IsoLinux 3.3 something, copyright by someone)

It was the 64 bit version (maybe I need to stick with 32 bit). I checked the hash using md5sum and it matched. I burned it as a .iso image file. How is it possible that I can never seem to get past installation in almost all of these distributions? Is it that my set up is so unique that no distrubution can support even an install?

Actually, iirc the full version is

"Don't force it, .... get a bigger hammer."