i just got a new vaio off ebay and i think it'd be fun to run linux on it since the only reason i would run windows is for games and i dont plan to play anything too elaborate on this thing. i'm not sure which distro i should run, i was thinking slackware, debian, maybe even lfs, the only problems i forsee currently involve power management, i've heard of some people complain about battery life loss after switching from windows to linux at www.linux-laptop.net. i plan on setting it up for power management using a guide such asthis, but i'm not sure if it will be enough. i want my battery life to at least match my battery life in windows. any tips or good sites concerning running linux on a laptop or linux power optimization would be appreciated.

i also have a couple of questions:

is it possible to set it up to do things like, go into sleep when i close the screen?

some of the drives recommend spinning the hard drive down, but could spinning the hard drives up and down too much waste battery or damage the hard drive?

does suspend(sleep/hibernate) spin the disk down? i remember a laptop that i had about a year ago stopped going into sleep mode when i closed the screen and the drive broke within a week.

will using supspend to disk(hibernate, i guess) fragment my disk badly?