The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

One problem I've noticed -- having about six or seven (depending on 
whether one counts the pismo powerbook my eldest daughter dropped on the 
floor but which I still want to revive) laptops of varying age is the 
disappearance of support for older laptops. Not only the way-too-new sound 
chip on my twin daughters' lenovo laptops isn't supported yet, but the 
hoary sound chip on my eldest daughter's Dell 5150 laptop doesn't work 
with 2007 vintage laptops anymore (Kubuntu and Suse). My Lenovo X61t 
worked fine with the previous Kubuntu, but not the current one, thought 
OpenSUSE 10.3 works fine in almost all respects. Of course, compiling KDE4 
and KOffice2 all day doesn't allow it to do its power-management best...