I wiped Vista with a fresh copy of Fedora 8. I'm normally a Debian & Ubuntu person, but I decided to give Fedora a go for a change. It installed without any major problems. It would've been nice if it had started NetworkManager for me, so I could easily configure my wireless network.
Yesterday I decided to install a copy of Windows XP, which I had lying around. Once again, I'm not a Windows person and booted into Windows maybe twice a year on my old laptop, but since I have a license, I may as well put it on. There were issues with the boot CD and it not going any further. Recommended BIOS tweaks for the HDD to be detected did nothing either. So I am now trying an alternative method. I installed Windows XP under VMWare, installed all the drivers for the laptop that I could, and will try to copy the vmware image to the real partition, resize using ntfsresize, modify the boot sector and the boot.ini, and then see what happens. I will of course document my steps if I'm successful. Sounds neat, no? :-)