Massive Issues - - Please Help

Where to start? I had an HP Pavilion dv6809wm laptop.. It Died.. Hard.. Full HD crash.. Contacted HP support and was told

"It isn't a matter of if, but when, our hard drives will fail, the replacement is $144.00 plus tax and shipping, what is your CC number"

Just that fast. Well I knew I could get an HD a lot cheaper from the same manufacturer with a 2 year warranty, HP only offered 90 days. So I bought one.

I went to try and re-install everything only to find I needed to purchase the recovery discs from HP, which I did ... reluctantly. The discs arrived and I tried to load them up.. NOTHING .. they were in a crumpled paper envelope and scratched beyond the possibility of being read... They came that way from HP..

I also have a Dell Vostro 1500 it worked fine but the screen was cracked, so I decided to pirate the screen from my HP and put it in my dell.. It worked perfectly.

Then I got a MAJOR Virus somehow, I was running NOD32 which I was told was one of the best Anti-Virus packages out there. Within 3 hours of realizing I had a virus and trying to clean it everything was dead, the computer wouldn't even boot, it just gave me a Fatal System Error screen.

I had all of the back up disks for the Vostro so I put my brand new HD in the Vostro and tried to re-install everything.. No luck, tons of missing drivers, among those were video and internet drivers, I got around the video drivers by hooking up an old CRT, but I couldn't get on the internet to download any updates or missing drivers.

I took my Vostro to a buddy of mine that loaded Windows 7 "" FULLY LICENSED "" I still can't get the screen to work, though the 2nd monitor works.. KINDA.

My friend told me to go into BIOS and see if my monitor was disabled.. I spam the hell out of F2 so I can get in but then my CRT tells my that my resolution is out of range.. only for BIOS.

So I need help with that.

ALSO.. when we were first installing 7 at his house I was able to connect to the internet wirelessly.. once I got home I clicked on the little icon that tells me there are networks in range and found mine and clicked connect. It said it was gathering info from the network, never asked me for a security key, and then told me I was unable to connect. It also never asked for Keys for any of my neighbors' networks that were in range.

So I need help with that too...

Please help me, currently I'm having to use a back up laptop IBM T21 with only 120Mb RAM and it is stuck on a docking station that I lost the keys for.. My life sucks right now.

Lol pretty much the same *plum* is happening to me lmao

Anyway, I'm reinstalling ubuntu over windows xp.

I can't help you though... My HP laptop's hd crashed recently as well so... Don't buy HP either

I never learned linux and I don't really have to time to try and teach my self how to use it..

BUT
would that even fix my driver issues?

It fixed my PC (by installing Ubuntu) which is pretty much custom build with MSI Corecell and other drivers... don't know if I now need to go through all the drivers that are installed on my PC and go to msi to download them... seems to work fine.

The desktop seems to work nearly the same way that windows works...