Thanks for the recent round of comments I’ve been getting, directly to my blog and also sent to my Friendster account.
David, the first thing I thought when you said that you’d upgraded your laptop’s memory was "Is your memory uneven?"
I’ve heard that Linux doesn’t really like it when you don’t have the same amount of memory in each slot. Personally, I’ve never run into it, though I’ve got 1 gig in one slot and 256 megs in another. If your memory is uneven, that might be causing the booting problems.
I sympathise with the comments I’ve had about me giving away CDs. I’ve given Linux CDs to some friends, which haven’t been used. I don’t mind it if they’re a really busy person, as I’ve got a couple of live distros which I’ve been meaning to try but haven’t gotten around to; but some of these friends aren’t busy enough for this to be the problem 
I can’t remember if I mentioned it here, but:
My father almost refuses to use my computer. He used it once recently to OCR scan some documents, but then he immediately took the resulting text files onto his old iMac and Mac OS. He edited those files in Microsoft Word, complaining the whole while about how terrible Word is, that it’s just a toy, and that Microsoft have obviously never used a word processor. He uses IE 5.5 for web browsing on his Mac, which is absolutely HORRIBLE. It doesn’t render many pages correctly, but he always thinks that the problems are caused by bad web design.
So I set him up a user account on Ubuntu. Gnome, with the desktop icons down the right-hand side (like on the Mac), and a simplified Applications menu. I even set up Evolution with his e-mail details. I told him that I’d created this account and that he should use it for web browsing. Does he use it? Nope. I suggested he use OpenOffice.org (which is a lot more sane) instead of Word. He still hasn’t booted Ubuntu since the time he turned on the computer and made a coffee to find that GRUB had timed out.
He’s also got a flash MP3 player, which he loads from MP3-CDs. The old iMac’s CD drive won’t read many of these discs, so his MP3 player only ever has songs from those discs that will read. It’s crazy. He says he doesn’t use my computer "in case you want to use it", but he uses his computer even when I am asleep.
So if I can’t even get others in my household to use Ubuntu, what hope do I have of getting strangers and friends to?
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