The spec is Barton 2500+, GeForce MX 440 (with 1440*900 LCD), 1.5GB DDR333 RAM.

The box has been unused for a while since it was able to run Ubuntu 11.04 about the time the distro revision was released. I try to find a new distro for it since ubuntu 11.04 has expired for support.

However, I turn to find out a number of distro (even those claiming to be light) run quite slow regarding many desktop activities. And I've found that the process 'X' or 'xorg' consumes the CPU some 40% or 80% sometimes when I move a window or maximize/minimize a window, making the desktop rather lagging.

The distro I've tried include Archbang, Crunchbang i686 pae, Curnchbang i486, WattOS, and Slackware, all being a latest stable release. Thanks to my DVD RW, they don't produce e-waste to the Earth.

I once thought the video driver was to blame. So I switched to nvidia 96xx legacy proprietary driver when I was trying Crunchbang. Still no good.

What can I do to make the old box to run a Linux desktop? Which distro can I try?

the antique Gforce 2 mx 400 card ( i have one on a old machine)Xorg NO LONGER supports cards that use the 96 dirver

CentOS 5.9 fully supports it
or
CentOS 6.4
BUT YOU MUST DOWNGRADE X11 TO THE OLD VERSION IN CENTOS 6.3 !!!!!!!!!
you must install Xorg 1.12

centos 6.4 is using 1.13 !!

This computer has a Sempron 2600, 1.125MB of RAM, and mother-board video only. If you don't need to play games (or watch a planetarium), then remove the GPU.

Removing the GPU would only be possible if its actually a video card (it could be a nForce 2 with a intergrated GF4 MX440).

Even if it is possible, AMD wasnt like intel. Most AMD socket 'A' chipsets aside from the nForce 2 didnt have intergrated video.....those that do have video are worse than the GF4 MX440 (e.g. some SiS chipsets).

@ John VV- yes, the 96.XX drivers dont work with xorg 1.13+ currently, and possible never. But there are plenty of distros with xorg 1.12 around.

From what illidan.modeler posted, installing the nVidia drivers didnt help anyway.

The SiS chip-set is what I have, and I've very seldom had a problem: currently, only with Manjaro.

I have a legacy laptop with Athlon MT 1.6GHz and SiS (mainboard integrated with GPU). It's fine running a display of 1280x800 with a list of distros I've tried, including Bodhi, antiX, Mint XFCE.

The probable cause for the lagging desktop on my old PC may be Xorg or the video driver (nouveau or nvidia). The dual-boot old PC is quite fluent running Windows XP, with low CPU usage for daily desktop activity and firefox web browsing. So the hardware might not be the bottleneck and Xorg and/or Linux drivers may be.

Now I try a Ubuntu 10.04 for my old PC. It's not as fluent as the PC is running with WinXP, but it acceptable for daily use. When Firefox is loading a web page, the Xorg uses 20% of CPU while FF may use from 20% to all the rest depending on the web page. Firefox is a big headache for old-spec PC, but I have my bookmarks sync with it. It'll be inconvenient for me to switch.