Bad laptop. Bad!

A little over a year ago my parents bought me a laptop for graduation. No not high school graduation, college graduation. While I could have used the laptop in college for obvious reasons, I was excited that I had a new computer. My folks bought me a Dell Inspiron 5100. It’s a nice little laptop with 20gig hard drive, DVD/CD-RW combo, 256Mb of DDR ram, ATI 7500 Mobile graphics card, and a 2.66 P4 processor. Like I said, it’s a nice little computer, designed for basic use, some programming, and/or a small server. So what’s the problem you ask? I’ll tell you. The Inspiron 5100 model laptops (and a few others) use the Broad COM 440x drivers that are only supported under Win2K and WinXP. This sucks big-time since I installed WinServer2003. Now I’m stuck with a server that can’t serve! In the past I had Gentoo Linux installed on it and it gave me some trouble. Looks like I’ll be installing it again. Hopefully the new Gentoo 2005.0 install process works just as well as my last install.