MintabiePete, other than that I don't know what else to suggest. Regarding the display drivers, lets face it, on this front Linux is crap. I have long since given up on getting this to work fine. IMO this is the main reason why more people do not switch to Linux.
It is nonsense and a lie to say that Linux works fine on low spec or old machines. It might be true, but from a visual aspect (ie what you see on your screen even Windows 3.1 lperformed better)
Obviously this is not the case when you have the latest and the most powerful pc on the market. Then everything is brilliant.
In my case I use a Compaq EVO N600c laptop with 512 meg ram, 1gHz proc, and an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 Ly (aka Radeon Mobility 9000) graphics card. I can't even use Beryl on it
For WiFi at I use a Cisco Aironet PCMCIA card (known as Atheros communications AR5212 802.11abg NIC) which I cannot get to work either...
Performance overall is OK, but graphics wise my machine is quite a let-down. TBH Windows XP performs a lot better on this machine. What I hate most is when you minimise something, it takes a few moments to go away, instead of 'poof' - and its gone. To restore again, in this case Firefox, takes 0.8 seconds (I've timed it) from the moment I clicked on it on the Gnome Panel till its restored. to minimise takes longer - 1.2 seconds.
Until proper display drivers gets sorted out in Linux, most people will still hang on to Windows, or keep their dual boot and Windows partitions.
On the positive side, I bought myself a NAS box over the weekend and was better able to configure it via Linux than what I could using Windows. (Weird or what?)
I have a dual boot system windows2000/linux-mint bea , and in bea when I am in firefox on the left with the bookmarks I can scroll up and down no worries , but as soon as I try and scroll in the main area , it is awfull , it , overruns itself and is a real battle . Incidentally in win2k the mouse works perfectly especially scrolling using the middle wheel .
