I have installed Red Hat 9 on my desktop as a dual boot with WinXP once and had fun with that...then of course the modem turned out to be a winmodem which I thought "hey, cool! A good chance to try and learn Linux 'hard core' Ill do some research"...right...that ended up leaving me more dazzled frazzled and confused than before...SO anyway...I'm taking a CNA course and wanted to be able to work on my notes and research while mobile with a low cost cheapo laptop able to handle linux with a GUI (right...what everyone wants...). Any suggestions for a noob about which model laptop to buy on a low - to -med budget and low experience with configuring and playing around? I was hoping to integrate with my home network as wireless but and getting more efraid with every post on the web I see claiming nothing but problems with wireless connectivity...I only need to do word processing and web surfing on the machine, so nothing "amazing" needed...Just looking for some guidance here. Any help is appreciated. You can email me at madevries@mail.com or reply and I'll check back tomorrow.

Thanks for your insight! Much appreciated. Kind of off topic I guess, but while I am here, I am studying for CNA on Novel/Suse Open Enterprise Server and just completed A+ & Net+ certification....not sure what to do next...MCSA, Linux+ or CCNA perhaps...? Any help there?

I would suggest an older Dell or IBM laptop. You can find one on ebay pretty cheap. Just shop within your budget and you will become aware of what features you can afford. Laptops are still pretty tricky to configure on Linux, but with some time and patience, you should be able to implement most of the features you want. If you are considering any kind of Linux certification, you might as well get to hacking, because you will need to go far beyond simple installation and configuration.