Well I had a catastrophic hard drive failure. I was a windows user, so not unfamiliar with such events.
The dell warranty provided me with a new (blank) replacement hard drive. The hard drive did not come as the laptop came (pre installed) and of course I didn't have the recovery CDs on me (safely packed away a long way away). I used the opportunity to move to fedora core 5. So far, so good. The power management was a pain to setup , but with Fedora FAQ I was able to sort it out (www.fedorafaq.org). It is also rediculous that it doesn't come with "drivers" for the intel 2200 wireless chipset (ie the centrino stuff that you see adds for everywhere you look) - I assume there is a politico-open-source issue preventing them, but it is a pain. it wasn't hard to install, if you were already on a network.
Yum rocks hard !
http://del.icio.us/michaelneale/fedora
Viva le Fedora.