Have to get this of my chest: took me five attempts to get Mint 14 working on my old XPS 1710 with mobile Quadro card. The main problem was getting the brightness controls to work - after two weeks of fiddling with all sorts of configurations, grub, and so forth, noting helped. I broke Mint three times. 
I’m a bit of a Linux noob.
I was about to give up on Linux again, and purchase a license of Win7, but today I installed Nvidia’s newest drivers: and low and behold, beautiful 1920*1200 automatic high dpi setting, with full brightness controls, and opengl working fine! Yeah, I know, I should’ve installed these earlier - but according to many articles the community drivers were supposed to be better, or at least, preferred over Nvidia’s official drivers.
Anyway, just happy that I got it to work. Looks SO much better than WinXP, and feels faster as well. Tomorrow I’ll install Blender, and see how it runs on that old dog.