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[Tellemurius]

Yea scrub the drivers, sounds like they took a huge dump.

[Wolfkit]

Speaking as someone who has no real experience with Linux (not counted whatever variant they installed on those shitty EEEs my highschool had, good Armok those were terrible) yet needs to dual boot Linux to run some software for an astrophysics internship this coming semester, what would you recommend? I am fairly computersavy and am perfectly comfortable using command line.

[Arx]

I like Mint. It's not particularly obtuse, but it's definitely functional as Linux.

[Thief^]

Speaking as someone who has no real experience with Linux (not counted whatever variant they installed on those shitty EEEs my highschool had, good Armok those were terrible)

That was probably xandros. I had Windows 7 on my eee, that was actually pretty good. Any other linux would probably have been good too!

[...] yet needs to dual boot Linux to run some software for an astrophysics internship this coming semester, what would you recommend? I am fairly computersavy and am perfectly comfortable using command line.

I second Linux Mint. On the graphical side, it's like what Ubuntu used to be before it tried to become MacOS. On the commandline side, it's basically the same as Ubuntu, i.e. "Debian but actually up to date".

[miauw62]

You could also run a VM if its just for that one piece of software.

[Aklyon]

I will third Mint. Good linux distro.

[gimlet]

You can make a bootable USB of most versions of linux (Mint for sure) - that might be something you'd want to try first, it's pretty painless and doesn't involve changing anything on your nicely running hard drive.  They're usually called "LIVE linux".  Or if you have a spare hard drive even better, you still might want to use a USB loader to select which OS to boot, that way you can leave even the existing hard drive boot sector untouched. 

If you do decide to do surgery on your running system, **backup anything important first**  it's still a risk no matter how simple it looks, especially when you're mucking with the partition table.  And pre-make some recovery tools, bootable CD or USB with utilities - like Hiren's Boot CD/Ultimate Boot CD.  Having a laptop or another computer will be handy for websearching for help just in case too...

[Arx]

Mint has an option to install alongside another OS that does the partitions painlessly for you. Always backup, though.

If you know someone who uses Mint, you can ask them to write an ISO to a USB drive for you.

[Aklyon]

I'd used Universal usb installer last time I need a live usb.

[Astral]

So I'm looking to purchase a laptop, primarily for the purpose of light gaming while I'm away on business trips. I haven't purchased a laptop before, preferring to stick to the nice spacious full size case and replaceable parts of a desktop, so I figured I'd ask for a bit of advice on this one.

Mainly, I'm going to be using it to play modded Minecraft (FTB Resurrection), so 4GB of RAM minimum is a must, as is 64-bit and a decent processor. A decent graphics card may help, and nVidia if possible only because I'm most familiar with them (but it doesn't look like they tend to have any mobile solutions). Windows 7 would be preferable, but I suppose it could be time for me to familiarize myself with Windows 8, as I've heard it's not as bad as Microsoft's track record would usually indicate for their even numbered release, particularly on a mobile device.

My preferred price would probably be in the below $400 range.

Any manufacturers to stay away from? Any that people love? These are also things that I'd like to know.

Any suggestions? These are some of the ones I've been looking at so far:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231987
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3TX2FB0584
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232218
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1N82E39723

[Thief^]

$400 is awfully little for a "gaming" laptop. nVidia do do mobile GPUs, but nothing in that price range. It may be worth looking at AMD laptops, as their integrated GPU is still far better than Intel's (which many things won't run on at all).

That said, out of the ones you've posted links for the 2nd easily has the most powerful CPU.

[gimlet]

Be careful, check those cpus on a benchmark site like http://www.cpubenchmark.net  - it looks like the 1st one (A-5000) is about the same power as an old core 2 duo/low level Athlon II, and the celerons are about half that.  Compare that to your current desktop cpu to see if that's a power level you can live with, because that's pretty anemic nowadays, although not tooooo awful for a laptop.

The 2nd one has intel graphics, beware.  Look up the graphics chips on a benchmark site too - actually for a quick comparison this hierarchy chart is handy: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html   and the cpubench guy has http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

For a little step up, how about
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=34-259-543
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232278
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834259885

which look like they have a lot of the same issues - intel graphics, or integrated graphics, but at least a bit more cpu beef...

[Astral]

Nothing could really compare to my desktop's current specs without going into ridiculous price ranges. 16 GB RAM, nVidia 970, i7 3820 @ 3.6 GHz... it runs Minecraft servers on FTB packs alongside the client and graphically intensive games like Battlefield 4 without a hitch.

Integrated graphics will be a problem at my low price ranges, but as I said it's mainly to play Minecraft with, which shouldn't rely on much more than raw CPU power and RAM. I might get some other light gaming in, as I have a few untouched Steam games that should be within the low spec requirements of a computer on this end of the weak side.

[PyroDesu]

Nothing could be easy, could it? My brother's computer is now failing POST - earlier today, it was giving 3 short beeps, pause and repeat, I reseated the RAM and now it's generating a short followed by a long, pause and repeat. Mobo is Foxconn. I can't find anything myself, anyone know what's probably having the issue?

EDIT: Now that I've fond the manual for what I think is the right mobo type, I think that the first code may be it reporting a base 64k RAM failure (which I think means one or more sticks is dead), and the seconds is I derped up reseating the sticks. Maybe.

[Sappho]

Nothing could really compare to my desktop's current specs without going into ridiculous price ranges. 16 GB RAM, nVidia 970, i7 3820 @ 3.6 GHz... it runs Minecraft servers on FTB packs alongside the client and graphically intensive games like Battlefield 4 without a hitch.

Integrated graphics will be a problem at my low price ranges, but as I said it's mainly to play Minecraft with, which shouldn't rely on much more than raw CPU power and RAM. I might get some other light gaming in, as I have a few untouched Steam games that should be within the low spec requirements of a computer on this end of the weak side.

As someone who was stuck playing Minecraft on a laptop, I can assure you that the video card *is* important to Minecraft. I had an i7 and 8 GB of RAM, but a low-end NVIDIA card, and I could never run Minecraft on anything but very low settings. The main problem was the view distance. I could never put it above short. With mods, I had to set the view distance at the absolute minimum, and I couldn't run larger modpacks at all. Trust me, it's not fun to play on the shortest view distance. You can hardly see anything. And even then, I still got frequent lag. I'd see if you can test out the game on the computer you want before spending the money, or at least make sure you get a good return policy in case it doesn't work.