I found this to be a good site before buying a laptop: Linux on laptops http://www.linux-laptop.net/
Looking up your machine I read passages like: "Dell Inspiron 600m running Red Hat 9 In my opinion, it seems that dell tried to make this laptop as Linux un-friendly as possible. I've tried to install a couple different Linux distributions on this laptop but Red Hat 9 is the only one that I've been able to make most usable. ...." Good-luck, Synco
