>I'm in the market for a laptop, preferably an Athlon, from a company 
>that'll either preinstall both Windows and Linux on it, or one that will 
>give me an actual copy of Windows so I can repartition and install them 
>both.  Any suggestions on who to talk to?

I bought a Dell a few months ago (P3, not Athlon). Anyway, you get disks for
everything..... and the first thing I did was wipe everything and reload the
machine for scratch. One of the CDs you get includes ALL the Windows drivers
for the machine, so reloading was pretty painless. (Based on various
experiences my friends and I have had, Dell is pretty unique in this area.)
Also, their web site is one of the best when it comes to driver updates.

I have not run Linux natively on the machine myself (using VMWare), but at
the time I was shopping around, Dell was still offering Linux as an OS
choice. So, Linux should be fine with the hardware.

Lee Behrens