Quote Originally Posted by workingonit View Post
Dougal, maybe it's your Dell that does not want to play - curious, how do you know it has it if it doesn't show? Is there a PAE option in BIOS? From wiki "Physical Address Extension"
Yes it is the Dell, or rather the Pentium M chipset it uses. It's a common problem with Linux on the Dell D600 and other high end laptops from that era.

Crunchbang installed ok on it, but at this noob stage I needed a bit more out of the box functionality. Older versions of Ubuntu install but require hacking to reach repositories so other software can be installed.