I've never owned a laptop from new, so its all rather exciting ;)

The first thing I'm doing is backing-up EVERYTHING to CD in case anything goes wrong... I haven't even so much as booted Windows yet! The problem is, it seems that if you screw up, there is no way of reinstalling Windows since you dont actually get a Windows CD with it! Maybe there is a "rescue" partition somewhere on the drive which has an image of the installation *shrugs*... I dont know, I've never owned a laptop as new as this, so I don't know what to expect!... Oh, and for those wondering... you'd better believe that Linux is going straight on this once the backup is done ;)

(Yes, it still has its protective packaging on - I've literally only just got it out of the box!)

Thank you to everyone who donated!

*Update*

Laugh... I think I'm right about the rescue partition since now I can see it backing up "IMGFI.GHO"... so I'm basically making a Ghost image of a Ghost image at the moment... oh well - peace of mind, I guess!

*Update 2*
Okay... so after much messing around with various Linux distros (Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu...), I decided that none of them were really cutting it - the only one that came close was Ubuntu (SuSE doesn't have the video drivers... fedora just sucks, Ubuntu worked out of the box but I just dislike debian-based distros. I decided to go with (you guessed it) Gentoo! Can't say I regret it, everything has gone smoothly so far, Centrino wireless is working great, sound is working, built in ethernet is working... the only minor issue I've had is the little "suspend" button that the screen presses against when closed makes the screen turn off and never turn back on. After a minute of googling, I found this is a known bug and theres a tool to fix it called "video_post"... its a bit of a hack, but it works. Now I'm just waiting for KDE to compile ;) Oh.. and even speedstep works! This is what happened when I began compiling KDE:

Inspiron root # freq
600MHz
Inspiron root # freq
1200MHz
Inspiron root # freq
1400MHz