cmccrea

Without knowing your system setup I have found that the best configuration if possible is creating swap partitions on each individual hard drive. The old discussion rages as to the size of it, but I normally reserve 1GB on each drive. I have 700 odd meg of RAM in my machine. The pro for a swap partition is that it is dedicated purely to that function and therefore the read speed is no slowed by having to process other irrelevant data.

I have recently switched from Windows to Linux and without starting some distribution war. With my lack of knowledge I found Ubuntu and its variants or Fedora Core to be the easiest to use. There are hundreds of forums out there that can and do help the inexperienced. If the laptop can run Red Hat ES then it should be no problem to run one of the desktop variants.