Alby_da_Wolf on 30 March 2009
^^
In this case years ago I found a very easy first step that up until now always worked: trying to boot a recent Knoppix release helped me exclude HW failures a lot of times (so after I started Windows in safe mode, that's much less compfortable to work with, to remove and reinstall drivers and SW, but not having to work in safe mode more than the strict necessary) . It's also a quite safe step before installing whatever else Linux distro, if Knoppix works, you know drivers exist and the worst you have to do is to install them manually if it didn't happen automagically (I had to do it for my notebook with 7.10 Kubuntu, but already starting from one of the first kernel updates in Kubuntu 8.04 I had full automatic detection of my HW).
