Pentium III 800mhz 512 mb ram 80 gb hard drive GeForce 4 MX440 64mb AGP card Have a network card and wireless network card, off brands, knoppix doesn't see the wireless card but does see the network card. I have the following distros: Stux Knoppix Ubuntu 8.04 Gentoo 2007 SimplyMepis Not sure which is best for me? I know Knoppix is only a Live CD but can be installed. Stux I think is just a Live CD as well, only booted it once, kinda like Knoppix better. Any other distro's you guys recommend. It's an old desktop I have laying around and I want to be able to surf the web, email, etc... with it. It runs XP Pro SP2 just fine and is actually very fast for a windows machine (faster than a Dell P4 2.4 ghz w/ 256 mb ram).

Well Gentoo is fairly fast out of the box and it's solid if you know Linux already. Im not 100% sure but I think @ only 800mhz Ubuntu would run a bit sluggish as would Mepis. You can always use Ubuntu if you like it and install Xfce as a desktop to speed up your box. If you know Linux you can also try Slackware.

I would definitely recommend, at most, Xubuntu. But you will probably have better luck with something like Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux. Search the forum; there have been a number of posts/questions like yours.

XUbuntu would be a good choice. An LTS version of Ubuntu would also work. You have a decent amount of RAM, Processor etc..

Well I put Ubuntu on my spare small hard drive and I just switch the power connector on the drives when I want to boot to Ubuntu. That way it never sees Windows. It runs good on my 800 mhz P3.