Help and/or reassurance?

[viranh]

I am going to be replacing my now-sold and gone laptop about the first of September. Unfortunately, my old friend Windows XP is not allowed to be sold after June 30, and I don't have money before then. I have used Vista minimally, enough to know I don't like it at all. I thought that I might just make the jump to Linux completely, because I do like it, but I have never had much luck getting it completely functional. My current laptop that is getting me by until then has never gotten along with Linux, and I wanted to use it to learn from.
Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop from ~2001, currently running windows xp pro
Hard Drive: Samsung MP0402H
Graphics: Mobility Radeon
CD Drive: TEAC CD-224E (removable)
Processor: Intel Pentium III mobile 800 mHz AC power, 600 battery
RAM: 256 Mb
Sound: crystal audio (burned out), Creative Sound Blaster 24 bit Live! (usb)
Networking: PCMCIA Netgear MA401 wireless b card

computer cannot install Mandrake 9.2, it cannot load Ubuntu (or maybe it can after 20 min or so), but can install (tested mostly w/ Fiesty)
is having terrible problems with Debian, unknown age (maybe etch?)
CAN run open SuSE 10.2, but slowly. This computer has been very stable with Windows XP Pro, but has so much trouble with Linux.

What are my chances of having better luck with a new laptop?
I will have an NVidia graphics card of some kind, probably a Quadro FX of some sort, dual core processor, and an excess of RAM. I was considering a solid state drive because it's within my budget and I'm rough on my computers. I'd like to be able to run CAD (Pro/E wf 3.0 probably) through emulation (WINE, VMware). I need excel, powerpoint, and word, as well as a calculation package like MathCAD or Maple. Open office's version of excel doesn't seem to be able to fit a trend line or do a regression, so I need real excel.

I'm not afraid of learning something new, but I've been so frustrated lately. I am decent with computers. I got win xp to go from using so much memory it could hardly boot all the way to being as fast as my laptop that was only a year old (with about 6 crashes and formats along the way). But I can't even get Linux installed and running decently. Is there any hope?

[jayd512]

Hi, viranh!

Some of those distros you mentioned are a little older, and hardware support has improved greatly since those releases. I think you'll have pretty good luck with a newer lappy if you put on a fairly recent distro. Try it out Hardy Heron and we'll see how it goes!