I would suggest Crunchbang Linux. It's Debian based if you learned on Ubuntu. apt-get installation makes it relatively easy to install applications. It's built off of the openbox window manager which makes things VERY fast. Very low memory usage as well.

I use Xubuntu on a very old Dell Dimension B110 and it flies along sweetly! Pretty, fast, simple enough even for me, lol, and works right out of the box.

Xubuntu is fine for low spec computers, it'll run on most anything. I ran it on a Dell Latitude C640 w/256MB RAM, it did quite well.

However, it may be worth trying Mint 9 or Ubuntu 10.04, as both are good, even on older computers. Either should run well w/o high specs.

Whichever you decide, being that it's a low end laptop, it probably would be best to do the formatting as ext3, rather than ext4. When you read the release notes prior to choosing your distro (please do this), you'll find this in "known problems". It has to do with the package manager freezing at times.

Plus, if you decide that Linux isn't for you, and revert to XP, it'll have a very hard time reformatting for the reinstall, should the HDD be formatted as ext4. I know this firsthand. It took me 3 attempts to reinstall XP (and several hours), due to XP having a hard time formatting over ext4.

BTW, I always use ext3 for formatting Linux installs anyway, even on newer computers.

Cat

Damn small linux , or turbolinux , puppy linux , there are a lot of posibilities

Heres a list with the lightest at the top:

1. Tiny Core
2. Arch Linux
3. Linux Mint Debian