Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD on Sony Vaio VGN-NR120E laptops

I bought a Sony Vaio VGN-NR120E laptops on boxing day of this year. It's a medium size laptops with 15.4 inchies of screen coming with silver and non glossy body (I like the body so much). I think it's a cheap laptop with the original price of $799 and $200 off, so I only paid $599 plus tax. As usual, it's coming with Windows Vista preinstalled on it.
My plan with my new laptops is to dual boots with my favorite Linux distro, Ubuntu 7.10. I had an experience in setting up dual boots Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.04, non a laptops though. I successfully dual boots my Dell Optiplex GX260 after I cloned the hard drive before it (to anticipate if the process of cloning was unsuccessfull). The process of cloning was much easier that what I thought before.
So I inserted the Ubuntu live CD on the drive on wait, ups, it won't boot. What's wrong. I expect to run the live CD smoothly, but not this time. I have tried several distros of Linux live CD without a problem, but that's not on laptops though. I was affraid if I won't be able to run (and later install) Ubuntu on my Vaio laptops. I read the problem of booting with this laptops is due to SATA hard drive installed in the laptops. Then I do googling and found a solution that are listed below:
1. Insert Ubuntu live CD
2. When asked to choose many options (Start or Install Ubuntu, ect) press F6 (Options)
3. Type:
break=top
then press Enter
4. Then at the prompt, type:
modprobe piix
exit
After doing those steps, the monitor blinks little bit then boot normally.
The display was not normal though, it looks like the 12 inchies display laptops.
The wireless was not detected.
The function keys such as increasing/decreasing volume/brightness were working normal.
Next plan is to really dual boots on the hard drive, so I'll post again after I have done that.

Perfect Gift

Have you decided what gift you want to have or you want to give in this holiday season (boxing day)? If not, you may consider a Toshiba U300 notebook. It's a small (13.3 inches wide screen) stylist notebook/laptop coming with 1.7 GHz Intel Dual Core Processor and 160 GB hard drive capacity. Not many stores offer this great notebook. It's available in Futureshop store and unavailable in the Best Buy. The tricky thing is that the notebook is not available when you view Futureshop online version. Last night when I went to the store, the guy there told me that they still have the stuff in the store. So please have a look and check it out. Hurry up before they're sold out.

Office productivity softwares

Besides Microsoft Office, there are other office productivity software such as OpenOffice and Star Office. Star Office is non free software, but if you are a student, you can get the free version of it without support. Open Office is the community developed based software based on Star Office. It grows very fast as many contributors work on it. Both Open Office and Star Office contain word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and data base packages. (cont)