[innovamanager]

hi dope540

my brother and i, we both have compaq laptops... different models but compaq... and we both have broadcom wireless card
I installed first opensuse 11 in my laptop and used ndiswrapper driver for the wireless card and it worked fine... but it was kinda messy to install... then i tried with my brothers laptop and we tried b43 driver and it worked ok... the only i had to do was plug it to the ethernet card to get internet connection and do as root /usr/bin/install_bcm43xx_firmware (as oldcpu points) and after that opensuse detected wireless card out of the box... so i uninstalled ndiswrapper and tried with b43 on my laptop and it works better than ndiswrapper... even gets stronger signal...

My brother has gnome... its kinda a laptop like yours... amd64 x2... and it works really good with a 64 bits system

My laptop is dual core and i tried with kde4 32bits... also have dual boot... i left 40G to Vista but i have a 120 G hard disk... i have it just because i need it for using ADOBE Illustrator for this work im about to finish... but my brother got rid of Vista... he had never used linux b4, but he got tired of his laptop gettin frozen and unconfigured for no reason... and I can tell he is quite happy now... the most he has told me is about perfomance, he feels its faster and lighter... also he told me its easier for him now getting covers for his music and his ipod... which in itunes was kinda difficult...

But if you dont use really specific software you can try not installing XP and use wine... i use it for some software too... i can feedback you about it....