I love my little AMD Athlon 4 FC4 laptop, but after it crashed for the second time today (while working on my wireless card, issued ifdown wlan0 && ifup wlan0), I think I'm going to sadly have to leave FC4. It's a little slow for startup. I'm going into highschool next year, and will use my laptop, therefore I'm looking for SPEED!!!! I want fast startup and fast open office. If anyone has an idea of a good distro, that comes with usb support etc, please let me know. (Let me put a list of what I want down below...)

-SPEED
-Built in usb support in kernel
-Graphical Desktop Environment
-Something not SuSE 9.3, knoppix, Slackware, Mandrake, Gentoo (I love them all, but their a little too much work for 4 weeks before school)
-Easy to install
-Open office.org out of the box.
-If you know how to do some major tweaking, PLEASE TELL ME!!!

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
-Peter

You just named some of the best desktop-oriented distros around so its a little hard to see what you're looking for if you think they're too much work. You could try Ubuntu, SimplyMEPIS or PCLinuxOS as well but I don't think they are particular any more easy to setup than Mandrake or Suse. You might find that PCLinuxOS serves as an excellent and very usable LiveCD however - maybe that will be simpler to 'setup' since all you need to do is pop it in and run.

Gentoo then, or Linux From Scratch, or even Slackware. None of these are quick to setup - they all require a fair bit of work and customisation.

Maybe if you list the particular problems you're having with Fedora it would be better to concentrate on getting that working before you go to school.

Hmmm I am biased, however, I would say Slackware or Mandrake...

Just remember, it's quality not quantity that counts...

KC

This usually has more to do with the desktop environment than the distro. I'd try a Gnome-based one, but you can always install XFCE or IceWM (or even Fluxbox) if that's not fast enough.
Almost all up-to-date versions of distros have this.
See above.
I'd recommend Ubuntu or Simply Mepis.
Ubuntu or Simply Mepis.
Ubuntu or Mepis.
The Ubuntu Guide answers all newbie questions about configuring a Ubuntu install.

If I were you, I'd go with Ubuntu, install it, then install XFCE.