I have had a pretty hard time keeping my laptop functioning. After a hard drive failure, the recovery Vista discs Gateway sent me would no longer work. Unfortunately, they aren’t actually install discs – they just read a repair partition on the original hard drive.
Gateway was not at all interested in providing me with legitimate replacement discs. All I got out of them after hours of pleading for a means to run a legitimate Vista install on my laptop (which I STILL have a license for) was another set of faux-replacement discs and a $20 handling charge.
I tried just about every flavor of linux. I even tried installing xp. Unfortunately, every road led to driver hell. Linux couldn’t handle my network ports or wifi card. XP couldn’t handle the video card. Luckily, MS released Win7 beta to the public.
After a super quick install, auto-update, and reboot, my laptop was up and fully functional. The only issues I have had revolve around hibernating. That is not too big a deal since I am yet to see any OS handle hibernation gracefully.
My current desktop:
