I'm dual-booting win XP and various Linux distros using FAT32, getting online and burning CDs on a Dell Inspiron 8500 and am very happy with it. After many research hours online making sure that the various Inspiron 8500 components were linux-compatible, I bought it. It has most of the features to make it future-proof (for a while at least), USB, Firewire, CD-RW, Infrared, etc.