I've got a 6yr old Acer Ferrari 3000 laptop that has served me very well but is now getting old & slow. It runs Windows XP, has 512Mb RAM and an Athlon 1.8ghz processor (full spec here: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/acer...-30615345.html ).

I use it pretty much only for watching DVDs, downloading TV programmes with BBC iPlayer and the very occasional spot of coding.

I figured that swapping bloated Windows XP for a Linux distro with an absolute minimum of software should speed it up and give it another couple of years of life.

So which distro would people recommend, bearing in mind its age, limited memory and CPU power?

Thanks
Simon

For this laptop I would recommend one of the standard distros with Gnome or XFCE desktop, like Debian, Slackware or Xubuntu.
If you want to use a even faster distro I would recommend to have a look at Vector Linux, AntiX, Puppy, Tinycore or Slitaz.

Slackware ;-)

But seriously - anything with xfce or similar desktop environment. I see that you use debian - maybe you should stick to it, or use xubuntu? It's your choice :-)

for a new Linux user .The options are a bit smaller

Ubuntu using the xfce desktop ( gnome would be a bit slow and KDE even slower )
kde needs some high system specs

Arch would be a good fit but NOT for someone not very very familiar with installing operating systems -- by hand-- from the ground up
now Arch would be a bit easier than Slack or LFS .

A good friend has just heartily recommended Crunchbang (XFCE4 edition), so I'll give that a go.

Crunchbang is a good option for this machine. I would rather use the Openbox edition, but I think that is up to personal choice.
If you think that your question has a sufficient answer, please mark this thread solved.

I'm replying to this post on my 6 year old Acer Aspire 3000 (512 MB RAM) and I've got Fedora 14 installed on it. Its slow and it lags for sure but I'm generally satisfied with it. Of course WinXP is 10 years old and it runs much faster than almost all the linux distros I've installed on this machine, other than maybe the time I had Libranet with Fluxbox (or windowMaker) installed.

I personally love Gnome and just can't bring myself to use XFCE and because of that fact I'm willing to accept the reduced performance.

I have a few laptops even older than this one and most of those run MicroXP (or tinyXP), which is a hacker version of Windows XP that boots in like 3 seconds and is stripped down to 100 MB or so, installing nothing but the core OS.