Hi, I've really only fiddled around with Linux in the past and I still use Windows primarily (yes I know, boo and all that) but I do have pretty good experience with configuring Linux, having used Slackware first and now Kubuntu mainly because it has lots of packages available. My problem is that both Windows and Kubuntu take over a minute to start up, and while this is pretty much fine for most cases sometimes I just want to check an email quickly in the morning or check the weather, and obviously I don't want to go through the whole bootup cycle and shutdown/sleep/suspend just to check an email. I was wondering what you guys think is the best distro for such a job.

All I require is Firefox and Thunderbird, and probably XFCE. I will want to have wifi drivers though since I'm using a laptop right now, and I must use ndiswrapper for those because my chipset is not supported by bcm43. One thing I was thinking of was that a distro that copied itself to RAM, like some LiveCDs do, might work well since I've got a new laptop with 3GB of RAM. I would love it if I could customize the distro before installing, and so maybe Slackware would be best? I haven't used it in a while though so I'm a bit rusty on some of the more advanced topics, but I am taking a course on *nix systems administration and I'm learning more than I wanted to know (at this point) about memory management and filesystems and bootloaders, so I think I will be fine with a more technical distro. Would Gentoo be another option? This is really going to be a more secondary distro as I've already got Kubuntu dual booting, so I'd like to just set it up once and forget about administrative stuff.

Puppy would be ideal, in my view. Not sure about the Wifi part.

Hmm, that does seem like what I want. I think I'll check it out this weekend, don't currently have any blank CDs with me.