Frustrations on PC's

My son's laptop needs a little loving, so I blew away windows and installed Fedora Core 8 (Linux) on it. The only problem is the wireless card . . . out of three wireless cards, the only one that ran in his was an Orinico one that I was using in my other Linux laptop. Grrr. Figures. I will hopefully have that sorted out soon, but I was just amazed at how many hoops I was jumping through for installation on things . . . it was really sickening. The latest FC8 though looks very nice and should be a good performance boost for his meager 800Mhz system. If I could find some memory for it and a new harddrive, it would really scream along pretty good . . . but my suggestion to him was to mainly concentrate on using it as a front end to a regular desktop over the wireless connection. He could then use his desktop PC and not worry about any speed issues. We'll see. He's wanting to do some hard core gaming on a desktop, so I've source a AMD 2.2Ghz barebones system that should satisfy his need for speed . . . at least in his price bracket. He would really like a Mac like mine though. :D A chip off the old block huh?