man. u hould totally go with slackware. Ive been running slackware on my compaq presario 2100 for say two years with no issues. All my devices were supported natively( maybe not all but most) and as for power management, its pretty decent and the issues you'll have will probably be with hibernation and standby which r still not production ready as at linux 2.6.8( see kernel docs). Otherwise i think it'll fly.