Go download a ISO of Mint 9.0 and iso burn it to a CD using something like Neroburn.

Then drop it in your CD drive and cold boot the laptop.

Inside a half hour you will know if it is gonna autofind all your bits and pieces or not and if it is gonna work flawlessly for you.

Ubuntu is another good'n, just not quite as easy to get into as Mint.   Both Mint and Ubuntu come in XFce and similar "smaller footprint" versions that might fit your older machine better (they were actually built for older machines).

The ultimate old box linux is Puppy Linux 5.0 -- and it is really fast even on very old machines.   Just not as user easy to utilize (requires you to command line some items).

Puppy will load the entire thing (OS and all programs) into RAM and run it all at ram drive speeds .....   this is the fastest responding machine you will ever see, just not as pretty or as painless as Mint.

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 01/05/11 at 18:55:34:


That's the most important part!  A lightweight window manager.  Linux is great and all, but load it down with KDE or Gnome and it'll run just as slow as windows.   I use Fluxbox on this 10 year old computer and it's plenty fast.    Gotta try Chrome too, I heard it is lighter than Firefox.

Do you have an account on linuxquestions.org?  That place helped me a lot.

Got a new power supply for my desk top and it is working great. My hard drives ain't messed up as I feared they were. It's funny though, I ordered a new 600watt power supply off of ebay and they sent me a new 680watt power supply instead.  

I couldn't get the Linux Mint 9.0 to boot up on my lap top. I made a boot disk out of an ISO file of the OS but my lap top wouldn't boot it up.

Did you do a checksum on the download to make sure it wasn't corrupted in any fashion?  

Next, when you burn it, burn at a slower than normal speed with your checking options turned on.

Full bore operating system ISOs have to be perfect in order to work at all and that can sometimes not happen due to cable or line noise, etc.

For the ISO not to try to boot at all signals a bad disc or one that didn't get recognized by your boot bios on your laptop (is your bios set to boot first from the CD drives or does something else boot first, a hard drive or a USB port?)