Linux Laptop Experience

Overall, the experience was decent. The machine ran far hotter on Mint than it did in XP, and it murdered battery life.
Much of this I think I can blame on the nVidia drivers, including its ultimate demise of the video card memory dying. I am not certain what was causing it, but the nVidia drivers did not allow you to set the powermizer setting, it was stuck on a stupid automatic that caused it to switch to performance mode every time you moved your mouse, and switch back down afterwards. Switching it up and down endlessly. I assume this is what killed it.

It also had some terrible trouble with multitasking, if two processes required the HDD, the system pretty much locked up until one of them was done.
And finally, if a full screen applications hung, you were hosed, you had to hard boot the system, Linux lacks any sort of terminate dead application key. You can try switching to command line and ending the program, but if you are like me, you will hit the power button over searching the process list.

I have Puppy Linux installed on one of my laptops. I have another laptop that I was going to use for school and I burned a live CD of the new CENTOs. It would get about 3/4 of the way downloaded and I would have an error. Someone told me to try just plain old Linux. So I burned a live CD of that as well and same thing - 3/4 and installation crash. Now I have a bunch of partial OSs on my harddrive, none of which can boot, and my hard drive says it's corrup, that there are too many corrupt sectors. However, i am still able to run both OSs from the disk and just not install, just not able to save any documents, pictures, etc. either.