Used to use Fedora/Redhat based distros (e.g. Scientific Linux,
www.scientificlinux.org) but they were always buggy with even slightly dated hardware. My IT guy at work switched me on to Debian, and I gotta say I love it and the vast choice of packages you can add easily with synaptic. Yeah, Ubuntu Unity sucks 'orribly; fortunately with all other distros one still has a choice of Window manager. I like twm because its small and lean; I can boot my G74 in linux with X, twm and all the usual kernel processes using only 200M of RAM!
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G74SX-CST1-CBIL, i7 2630QM 2GHz
32GB DDR3 RAM @1333MHz
GTX560M 3GB DDR5 (192 bit)
17.3" LED 1920x1080
Sentelic TP, BIOS 203
Debian Linux Wheezy (Testing) Kernel 3.2, NVIDIA 295.40