Well, my plan of installing Windows temporarily fell flat on it's face; Windows did not recognise the USB CD drive even though that was what I was using to run the part of Windows that was telling me there was no CD drive...

Of course there might be some BIOS setting that would work around that, but who cares really, I have SuSE!

That is a Linux distro that has a nice GUI and works just fine. I wanted to try Slackware, but I didn't get too far. Maybe next laptop.