Compaq Presario V6000 (junk)

So I bought this laptop on sale at BestBox about 9 months ago. I think that I have lost 9 months of my life working with this thing. At first I blamed the installed OS (Vista) for it not booting properly, rebooting or not booting at all. I have since installed several iterations of my favorite OS (Linux) and now I am facing similar problems. I have replaced the RAM, hardrive and operating system. I am now faced with erratic booting and CRC errors which completely halt the system. I have looked for BIOS updates which are provided by HP-Compaq for systems that have Microsoft Operating Systems on them. So my guess is that I just have bad hardware, which for a laptop the options of replacing parts become quite limited. I have had problems getting the built in WiFi (Atheros) card to work with my favorite OS. So the bottom line to this rant is to NOT purchase this type of laptop. The hardware seemed so promising when I bought it. Dual core, NVIDIA, 2GB of RAM.. would be more mobile computing power than I needed. My old IBM Celeron lasted for three years solid.. it was slow, but dependable. This one is fast but fails.