The dell inspiron 600m should have plenty of guts to run PCLinuxOS..As far as doing a checksum, a web search would of turned up plenty of information on how to do it on Windows, like this
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/using_md5sums.html#windows On a linux system it is as simple as after downloading CD pclinuxos-kde-2010.12.iso From the command line (console window) run the following:
md5sum pclinuxos-kde-2010.12.iso
to which you would get back... 72f39788908f11ccc630bd5bfef2d53e pclinuxos-kde-2010.12.iso if it were ok. Then you simple match what you got to the MD5sum file that was with the iso file you downloaded. The numbers should match, if not you have a bad burn or a bad download.