let's not ramble of onto a playstation topic, i want to reply to spinningheel.
spinningheel, i myself have a cantankerous piece of shit (but expensive, mind!) laptop whose hardware is determined not to work with ANY system (including win9x which is what it came with). I now dual boot between windows millenium (which has not seen light for about a week now) and mandrake linux 8.2 (i use this one daily). this is a few months to a year old now and i have found that newer distros have noticably more hardware support than distros of even a month or two before.
I recommend mandrake and red hat. Now both of those are currently on their *.0 (maybe even beta) releases, and i would recommend either getting red hat 7.3 or mandrake 8.2 (or is it 8.3?) which are the NEXT most recent versions, because these versions will not be so 'cutting edge' and so therefore will be more stable. At least this is the impression i have got anyway.
Other top picks that i have not tried are SuSE which is more of a commercial linux than most and so it will have a more no-nonsense approach to supporting people's PCs, and Lycoris, about which i have heard next to nothing except for mutterrings recently that it might be a good first time linux to try out.
Now your Dell of two years i don't know. If it's a desktop and if you have not installed any really weird cards and so on then you should be 100% OK. Likewise, a dual boot should work fine so long as you get your partitioning alright. I am the eternal tinkerer and i have had a few partitioning disasters,so watch your step. While it is easy to partition correctly, it is also easy to accidentally erase a lot of stuff!
One thing to do is find out what modem you have, find out what video card you have and find out what sound card you have. Then nosey around on the internet looking for references to those exact model numbers and see what other people say about them in linux.
OK. Hope i didn't sound too harsh up there but people who say "windows is good enough for me, think i'll just live with it" really piss me off. These (to my mind) are the same people that don't bother to vote, who take up space needlessly on the train and who say things like "nah mate, sorry but it's more than my job's worth"...
