Britton Kerin wrote:
I would like to buy my non-linux girlfriend a ready to use laptop with: wireless scan, falling back to CAT5 DHCPopen office CD ROM that automounts SD card reader that automounts working sound card reasonable memory and disk working video acceleration (at least a bit)
Unfortunately, my personal experience is that your requirements won't work out of the box. You may be lucky and find a laptop that supports the hardware you require, but you still need to set it up yourself. I've been having reasonably good luck with my expensive ThinkPad, but wireless, automounting, the modem don't work out of the box. With debian, eg. you manually have to add your user to the cdrom and audio and video groups to fully use your cdrom/dvd.
On the other hand, one has to be fair and say that WinXP doesn't work out of the box as well, you have to install office, adobe reader, a virus scanner... And after that you should regularly look for security updates of all the software that is not covered by 'windows update'. (And once you learned all the tweaks to set up a network in Win98, NT, XP, it won't be long until they revamp their OS and the next new PC in your network will break it).
My personal experience is that it takes more time to set up a linux laptop, and then it works. It constantly takes time to keep your windows system running and still you'll never know if there is a virus or trojan hidden from you.
I recommend looking at http://www.linux-laptop.net/ and http://tuxmobil.org/ and to expect to do some further research until your requirements work.As suggested in the other posts, take a Knoppix, Ubuntu live CD to the shop.
Johannes