I have had a terrible time finding a distro that worked for this laptop.
Using a liveCD for openSuSe (Gnome, 64 bit) I was so excited to see the openSuse come to life with good hardware detection, screen resolution, etc. Problem came when I went to log in through the GUI as a user. Whole system hung. I could log in as root in the failsafe mode, so I knew I was almost there.
While cheat code “nomodeset” did not work for me, using “noapic pci=noacpi” at the grub screen(leave the vga setting) seems to make the system perform without a hitch (using the regular boot choice).
I am not a linux guru, but I was so happy I stumbled on this cheat, I thought it might help somebody else.