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Post License:
GNU LGPL
Future Shop informed me that the warranty would be voided if I removed Vista Home Prem. and installed Linux. They were therefore "unlikely" to give a "windows rebate" for removing windows and substituting Linux - perhaps this is the way that MS has instructed HP, Sony, etc. on how to avoid having to deal with the windows rebate issue and continue to force MS products down people's throats - so I followed this procedure:
1) Used the HP backup software to create system recovery disks for Vista (took 2 DVD's to do this), just in case I needed to restore drive to original condition for warranty.
2) Took care NOT to touch the 10 GB "HP restore" partition on the HD; left as-is (otherwise you cannot restore the drive, even using your "restore disks" created in step 1).
3) Removed all the crap-ware from Vista (Norton, MS Office "trial version", etc.). Replaced with Avast antivirus and OpenOffice.
4) Cleaned and defragged the NTFS drive (which is a "joy" to do in Vista - you will see what I mean when you do this - but eventually the process was completed.
5) Used Kubuntu to shrink the 150 GB NTFS partition to 40 G. This worked well, but Vista had to run chkdsk several times to straighten things out to its satisfaction afterwards.
6) Then installed Kubuntu which worked great for everything but the wireless (Broadcom 4311).
7) Downloaded the windows BCM4311 driver (lspci reports it as a "Dell 1390 wireless", which is the same animal -can use the driver from HP or Dell, I used Dell), extracted the driver, and used ndiswrapper and the instructions at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4311_rev_01_(ndiswrapper)
to install, which worked great.
The only thing I haven't tried out is the webcam, but other users report it "just works" very well using Kubuntu 7.04. All in all, I highly recommend this laptop. It would be even better if HP would smarten up and not be such a MS pawn, re: the windows rebate issue. Happy computing. Doc.