Laptop appears to be back up and running, but there was something seriously wrong there.

After 30 minutes or so, the system would freeze up. Sometimes black screen, sometimes just a system freeze up. I tried booting into Windows, and thats where things got wierd. I got a "Your system needs repair." IT asked to run diagnostics...and the diagnostics froze. The BIOS Diagnostics said there were problems, but "it fixed them" (COULD YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU FIXED?!). Still couldn't get into window, and now I wasn't able to get into Linux.

No prob. Let's reinstall the system. I pop in a Linux Live USB and...it wont load. Kernel panic. O_O Pop in a Windows USB..."a file is corrupted."

Huh. I went into the bios and did a hard drive wipe, which worked. And then loaded up Windows, and got the corrupt error again. And then tried linux again, and it would load but with errors. At one point, it managed to load into Window, so I spefiically rewiped the drive in GPArted, rebooted and everything worked after that.

I think either there's a hardware error lurking (thanks Dell BIOS for giving me no info), or a BIOS update didn't take and one of the reboots knocked it back into shape.

But I'm keeping an eye on it, moving forward. And it's now my first all-Linux system. No Windows. Granted, it's mostly used as a portal to get to the file server or my working PC in the office, so you don't need much there....