This might qualify as another dumb newbie question but here it goes. I have an external CD/DVD burner for my ThinkPad laptop. The laptop runs XP. Can I download the FC3 iso files to my laptop and burn the installation CDs there? Will they work to install FC3?
Yes, they will, provided you burn the ISO images as "images", not just as regular files. See:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/e-smith/docs/howto/CD_burning_howto.php3
for how to burn ISO images using some popular CD-burning applications.
Paul.