hello, i'm new to the ubuntuforums' community but not to linux/ubuntu. today i bought a brand new laptop:

toshiba satellite l505d-s5983
basic specs - amd II (m300) 2.0ghz dual core cpu, 3 gigs ddr2 ram , 320 gb hd

nothing special. ah and it came with windows 7! yaay....not so much, SO of course the FIRST thing i wanted to do when i got my brand new shiny laptop home was get rid of that pesky POS windows and put a REAL OS onto it! and what a coincidence ubuntu 9.10 just came out!! i figured it was meant to be~! but not so much.

SO here is my problem, tried an older distro (9.04) and didnt work, kept hanging before even getting into the install screen. so i scrapped that and tried 9.10, this time ...same thing, so i went poking around the bios (which has an advanced section about | | <-that big) and found AHCI was messing things up, switched that and rebooted and YES! got to page 1/6 of the install! or so i thought, it locked up...tried restarting locked again...and again....sooo now i'm stuck with a $500 paperweight until the next big update? because i THINK it has to do with the drivers but again i'm not an expert...which is why i'm here..

SO please...any thoughts/advice/help? even stabs in the dark are greatly appreciated at this point!
thanks~