My friend has a old dell inspiron 9100 and I put ubuntu on it for a test run. I prefer Slackware of course and hope to move him over to it. XP has just become to outdated as of late and I'm hoping a light weight install of Slackware might do the trick. I noticed however that on ubuntu it seems a bit buggy with the video. I am sure this is a video card issue, because on windows xp this issue is not there. I am wanting to install the official fglrx drivers. I read somewhere that these drivers worked good on the inspiron 9100 fglrx 8.12.10 radeon mobility 9700. Can anyone lead me to some tips?

I have been looking for the drivers mentioned or newer ones, but all I can find is ancient posts about it in the past.

Is there a compelling reason not to upgrade the hardware? A quick check of eBay shows me the value of the Dell Inspiron 9100 is about $10. What is your time worth? What is your friend's time worth? Multiply that number times the number of hours this project will take; is the result greater or less than $10?

It's not the value of their current system that must be weighed. It's the cost of the replacement.

And a worth while replacement will be $100 or more.

They know best what their needs are, they can just load slack, then configure xfce or fluxbox. It's pretty straight forward. Spending a few hours installing/configuring Slack is an investment if you ask me.