hey guys,.. so is there any way to make sure drivers are available for my moms laptop (she dislikes windows 8) but i have to know what i am doing and i need confirmation , here's the model Sony sve14a25caw , specs are easily found on the web. can somebody with experience tell me what i need to do about the drivers or even if it is possible?

Different distros will have different driver support. The easiest and fastest answer is to just boot a live distro and see what does and does not work.

in my experiance with ubuntu and mint, nearly nothing worked on the live cd, only when i installed and pulled the drivers from the software center did they work.
---thanks still..

i do not know wat drivers most linux support but itll be appreciated if someone who knows took a look at my hardware.

You can use a live USB with persistence to install any and all drivers you might need.

The two biggest hiccups are usually the video card and wifi. That model looks like it has on-board Intel HD4000 and discrete AMD 7670M. The on-board driver will be fine, but you may run into issues with the discrete adapter. As for wifi, I don't see what chip it's using. If it's intel, those usually work out of the box on most distros. Except for Ubuntu, which seems to always have wifi problems regardless of the hardware.

You might try PCLinuxOS, the hardware detection/driver support is usually pretty good.

I have recently installed Linux on a friend's Sony Laptop (VAIO VPCSB). I tried all Linux Mint 14 Desktop Flavours on it in live sessions and I have found all of them to work pretty well. Note however that you may also have to consider support of printers, scanners and other periphal devices if you are going to migrate someone from Windows to Linux.
E.g. I found that Mint KDE, MATE and Cinnamon were able to recognize my friend's iPhone 4 out of the box (To download pictures and music), while I could not manage to get this to work in XFCE at all.
She also owns a Canon Printer and Scanner (Canon Pixma MG 5250). I could print from XFCE, MATE and Cinnamon, but not from KDE. I could scan only from Cinnamon.
Her bluetoothloudspeaker (I think it was called xqbeat or something like that) worked with XFCE, but not KDE and Cinnamon.
The bottom line being: You need to try it out, and the Desktop Environment may have a significant impact on how closely you meet the individual user's requirements. I guess with sufficient fiddling you can get everything to work, but it's nice to have as much as possible running out of the box...
Mint is nice in that respect because they don't seem to be afraid to include proprietary drivers and put popular but closed-source things like skype into their repositories. I am not saying this is a good thing in general, (very controversial discussion) but certainly it makes things easier in usecases like yours. (Migrating your mother from Windows to Linux).

In any event do yourself a favour and don't wipe here hard disk. Keep the windows installation intact so she has a fallback solution if something doesn't work as expected.

thanks, I didnt know that