I recently installed Cooker Snapshot 123103 on my Compaq Armada M700.
(PIII-500, 320MB RAM, 15GB HDD)
Everything works great.
I have had WinXP installed on it and it was slooow. Then Mandrake 9.1 (but I was not very satisfied with the speed of it) then switched to XandrOS 2.0 and worked fine.
I decided to try Cooker and man, I am one happy fellow.
Looking forward to Mandrake 10.
In my experience, get an older laptop, (eBay or your favorite computer store) cheap, then load Linux on it. Most likely all Hardware devices will work and it will definitely run faster than windows XP.
Linux is getting better and better everytime. And Mandrake makes it easier and easier with every new release.
