I remember I had an older (2006) hp laptop that had nvidia on it. I installed Fedora Core on it, and luckily nvidia had linux drivers, you had to compile them, but they provided them.
Took me a while to get it to work correctly but I did. I have a computer right now that I would love to put linux on, but it has a nvidia card in it, screw that, 7 it is.
Hey atelast you have windows 7. Windows 8 is crap. What's funny is that hp is bragging that they are now selling windows 7 computers instead of windows 8.