This must be my lucky day. I haven’t mentioned it here, but I recently updated to Hardy Heron, without a hitch. All my old problems with Bluetooth, crashes, and so forth, disappeared. It may have been so smooth because I updated the HP Pavillion bios (in Vista), which I think was previously causing untold problems. [...]

I’m bumping this again for my own convenience and hopefully someone else who needs it will find it.
[update: in case you haven't done this before and are wondering where is cdroot - when
you extract the .tar.gz it extracts to a folder called cdroot.]
[Ubuntu OS Installation]
1. Download and extract the driver
2. Open ”Root Terminal”
3. Execute [...]

Just making a quick note on an excellent tutorial in the Ubuntu Forums:
How to install Samsung Unified Printer Driver
My plans to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) may be put on hold as I discovered my dvd drive is scratching dvds. A tutorial on how to take out the drive for my particular notebook is [...]

Yes, me musing again. I suppose I’m wondering if I can dump XP altogether. OCR has been one stumbling block, as I need that fairly often.
The solution appears to be Tesseract, and here’s a tutorial on it. It seems pretty torturous, but I can’t say until I try, of course.

Optical Character Recognition With Tesseract OCR [...]

I still haven’t got around to installing the scanner on my Samsung scx-4200 - not that I’ve tried. I simply haven’t had time. (See under Printers & Scanners category).
The Ubuntu forums have several more entries since I last looked, and things are looking a little clearer - and there’s a new Samsung driver - so [...]