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[Tom <question77445@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #77445 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/77445

    Status: Open => Answered

Tom proposed the following answer:
Ubuntu (and possibly all the other distros you have also tried) is aimed
at top-end machines to compete favourably with Win7, Vista and such.
For machines being rescued from the scrap heap there are many other
distros that would be much better.

To give us a better chance of picking 'the best distro for this machine' (or at least a good range of options for you) please let us know the machines cpu speed, ram size and amount of hard-drive space available.  Given that Xp will work i would recommend trying sliTaz and Wolvix, 
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slitaz
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix

Preferably Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 - which brings us to the other crucial
question - what do you want this machine to do?  If you simply want
internet surfing, emailing and a few light games then that opens it up a
bit.  Wolvix Hunter also has the full OpenOffice already on it's LiveCd
and is also usually pretty good at picking up on any wiifi hardware it
finds during install (or when booting the LiveCd) but you'll need to go
through it's Control Panel to really get that kinda stuff working -
should be fairly easy though.

Of course it's best to try out any distro as a LiveCd on a machine before installing it - just to see if it will work easily.  With most distros just boot up with the distros cd in the cd/dvd-drive and that should get you to a splash screen, if not this guide might help
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD
just pressing enter should get you to a working desktop which we call a "LiveCd session" if it works.  A very few distros don't have this option, almost all of them do offer it.  Ubuntu and some others have a fancy menu instead of a splash screen.  Ubuntu calls the option "Try Ubuntu without making changes to this machine" but that's irrelevant because the machine can't handle the bloat of Ubuntu anyway.

So please let us know the 3 basic specs for the machine and also let us
know whether you want this machine as a server, office desktop, games
machine, simple web stuff or what and then we'll hopefully be able to
guide you to an appropriate distro to do that ;)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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