I have a Dell Inspiron 9300. I've had a couple of hardware related
problems:

1> My dvd playback was choppy, so I was looking around and found that the
IDE interface on the laptop is SATA (I have a 7500rpm drive and a dvd
drive). The default driver for my hard drive is ata_piix, and it is
mounted as scsi. So I assume everything is working OK. However, for my DVD
drive it uses some generic driver. I believe a SATA driver may be in
order, but I am not sure... My dvd drive is TSSTcorp CD-RW/DVD-ROM
TSL462C, mounted as /dev/hdc by default, as a 24x ATAPI drive with 1536kB
Cache. The driver is Uniform CD-ROM driver Regision: 3.20
The problem is I cant get DMA to work on the drive, using hdparm and
sysconfig/harddisks. The drive works perfectly in WinXP :(

2> My display is capable of 1920*1200, and this is recognised by linux, my
display card ATI Mobility Radeon X300 is also recognised and an
appropriate driver loaded, but I can only get to like 1600*1000
resolution. If I try to set 1920*1200, I get a tiled repetition of screens
which keeps getting corrupted.

3> To fix the above problems, I messed around quite a bit and now my
haldaemon is crashing on alternate boots, causing the computer to freeze.

4> Another reason I messed around was trying to get the buggy kwifimanager
to select the network I want and remember it... finally I'm using
wlassistant, but I cant still get the wifi light to work.

5> I cant get the Fn key extensions on my keyboard to work, like CD eject,
volume, wifi on/off...

Sorry for clubbing all the problems together, but I didnt want to load the
list with multiple emails.

I'm new to linux system administration, so any help would be appreciated.
Anyone had these problems? Anyone know how to try solving them?

Thanks,
--Vaibhav