Linux!

[brainface]

I don't know man. I haven't messed with DSL or crazy wireless cards enough to even guess.

About the only thing I can recommend is to make sure you got the most up to date versions of your distribution.

And uh, honestly, the one time I DID use DSL I wasn't much impressed with it--it looked nice, but random Very Important Things didn't work right. It didn't want to detect my laptop harddrive and took forever to boot IIRC. I wound up using Puppy Linux, which looks like CRAP but actually worked. YMMV.

[SDragon]

I'll have to try my puppy disc, then. Is it just me, or does Puppy seem to be based on Damn Small? They're both micro distros partially based on Knoppix, and they seem to share quite a few applications...

Edit- Can't find my Puppy disc, so I'm making due with Feather while Puppy is burning (god that sounds so cruel). Apparently Feather was the one I was thinking of with my previous statement...

[SDragon]

Puppy gives various hangups when booting from CD :/

Here's a blog I found with entries on installing Linux on the laptop in question: http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/09/06/resurecting-compaq-presario-1240-with-damn-small-linux/