If you have little experience with installing Linux and don't really know (like me) how to find and install extra drivers, that's really no problem... But you might have to sacrifice your Red Hat for another distro.

I was just in the same situation like you, I bought one of those brand new laptops with a 'designed for winxp' sticker on it. It turned out Red Hat didn't work out of the box, neither did Suse. Then I tried Mandrake, which worked fine.

IMO it's quite easy to customize the Linux even for a newbie. The really useful apps come with all the distros, and the GUI is easy to change. So there aren't really much difference between RH, Suse and Mandrake. So don't bother the hassle finding the updated drivers etc, just find another distro. Sure one of them are gonna work on your laptop.