Well Charlie S - Evo has answered pretty much all the points you raised. Laptops used to be a bit iffy with Linux since they often have non-standard hardware for which drivers can be hard to find. That said, on a older laptop like yours 9.1 will probably have the drivers anyway.
I replaced 9.0 on one of my machines with 9.1 and was a bit miffed when the upgrade didn't go as smoothly as I expected. Nathing drastic, far better than trying to "upgrade" Windows but enough to be annoying. Saved my HOME and did a clean reinstall which fixed everything up (except OpenGL on my Matrox P650 card). nVidia are the only people who have really solid Linux drivers and support.
Was it worth going from 9.0 to 9.1 - not really. I don't notice any real speed increase, KDE 3.2 is better than 3.1, but 3.1 worked just fine anyway. A couple of utility apps that I liked seem to be broken by the new kernel* but everything else runs just fine.
*I probably just need to recompile them using an older library.
I still don't think much of Konqueror as a web browser, in spite of a lot of improvements and I would suggest that you download and install Firefox (rather than the oldish version of Mozilla that SuSE include).
As regards running Windows programs you might consider downloading/ordering Codeweavers Crossover Office - at $29 it isn't cheap, but it does let you run a LOT of Windows programs under Linux. Otherwise you can see how you get along with Wine (which I've used very little).
Keep us posted and
Welcome to the free world!