I have been playing with Arch Linux for a while and am impressed by the memory and cpu footprint. You can try installing Arch and giving it a light-weight window manager.

in general windows managers such as xfve, openbox, blockbox, or tiling window managers take a minimal load on a system. When playing with arch in a virtual machine I was running a basic arch linux setup with the i3 window manager and I was only using less than 100m of RAM.

arochester wrote:

Does your computer have a Make and Model or is it just a Whitebox? What is the Graphics Card?

I have 2 Dell C400 laptops which have problems because of the Intel video. The distro that works best for me, out-of-the-box, is Aptosid. I am fairly sure that their kernel is based on Liquorix.

As a former Debian Sid user, I used aptosid when it was called sidux. Many users switch to using the Liquorix kernel because of restrictions incorporated into the default aptosid kernel. BTW - if you mention Liquorix in their forums or on IRC you'll get a response similar to bumping into a beehive. Just an FYI.

As for the topic, it seems like you have a much older computer which restricts your choice of distro, especially if your looking for speed. AntiX, which is a spin-off of Mepis does well on older computers. Link below:

http://distrowatch.com/index.php?distribution=antix&month=all&year=all

There's also Puppy, which just had a release today, link below:

http://distrowatch.com/index.php?distribution=puppy&month=all&year=all