I have fedora 16 running on a similiar laptop (dell inspiron 8600). On a laptop like that, i think the graphics card is what will make the most noticable differ

I have fedora 16 running on a similiar laptop (dell inspiron 8600). On a laptop like that, i think the graphics card is what will make the most noticable difference. Hopefully you have an intel or ati card with supported drivers. Nvidia let their drivers for that era go "legacy" and nouveau (the open nvidia driver) might be lacking even basic hardware acceleration. Sadly, Windows XP might actually be your best bet if have an nvidia card and you want to do things with flash and expect it to be somewhat performant.