Are you choosing versions at random? Fedora 9 is very outdated. Stop and don't do that. OpenSUSE 11 (which sub version?) is also outdated at this point, and you should probably go to 12.1.

I happen to like OpenSUSE, but you can try whichever you like. Hell, you can even use something like Virtualbox to create a virtual machine from within windows to get yourself used to them and find which one you like.

That way, you will likely have fewer hardware problems and can fall back to your windows machine to get on the internet if you have issues.