Have been fooling around with the LiveCD and so far it seems to work perfectly. Wireless and all!
I'll soon be making the switch and leave M$ behind for good!
Yup. I have it installed (tried both ubuntu and kubuntu) - they even can run on my USB drive.
I moved from a Gentoo system, which was actually running quite nicely. I am only switching cuz installations/upgrades are now lightning fast! Unfortunately, with (k)ubuntu, I now have to re-learn some of the configuration options and new locations of stuff. Gentoo had very nice configuration utilities (command line, but good), which are now gone and I have to do things manually.. ugh.
The only thing that hasn't worked for me for a long time is the ati proprietary drivers (fglrx).. I believe this is because the ATI drivers crap out with the 1680x1050 display and the 9200/9000 video card (i hear the latest windows drivers do the same). However, the default open source drivers work great, and have full hardware acceleration. Just doesn't have all the features needed for things like using playing windows games with cedega ):
im using ubuntu for 1 year now, and dapper ( 6.06 ) is the best one so far ;)
*Don't delete Microsoft operating system.* You have plenty of space on your hard drive to keep it for special purposes: You will *need* it later, along with Internet Explorer, if you ever want to use Compaq/HP's hardware diagnostic tools or to update (flash) various hardware component's BIOS stuff. See http://hp.com