I'm not new to linux, but apparently green in finding what will run the best on my lappy. First off let me explain I've had no major hardware issues, I'm just looking for speed and functionality. I have been running XP on it with the occasional try of a distro on a spare drive.

Hardware is:

Inspiron 8000
1GHZ PIII
256MB Mem
ATI 32MB vid
4GB HDD (may change when I find the 'right' distro for me)

What I'm looking for is what can give me the speed in comparison to XP, along with the eyecandy (3ddesktop, gdesklets for example) XP doesn't have. I'm willing to pay a price in performance for a little extra fluff. I keep XP trimmed down, clean, and it runs very well that way. Distro's I've tried thusfar include:

Ubuntu
Xandros
FC4
Linaire
VLOS
SUSE 10
Mandrake
DSL

and probably a few others I can't recall. Xandros has been the fastest of anything I've tested. I typically use the lappy for email and web browsing along with some html and photo editing, and ftp. I use firefox and thunderbird daily, and am familiar with the gimp.

I attempted Gentoo yesterday and this morning, but the installer kept locking up. I just didn't have the time to devote a week to installing an OS right now, but I may test with it later.

Any recommendations on what to try or retry and reconfigure? In my mind I really want to run linux full time on my lappy, but reality just hasn't gotten me there yet because most distros just run so much slower on my hardware then XP does.

Part of the problem you'll run into is the ATI video. ATI support in Linux tends to lack way behind similar support in Windows. As to distros, you seem to have tried all the common recent stuff (except Debian, but ubuntu isn't far off). Personally, I use Mandriva 2006 for all my systems, from my PII firewall, to my P4 3.0E desktop, including my IBM Thinkpad T-20. Don't expect a whole lot, as it's harder to get good support for some of the features of your system (like 3D video support). I can't even find ATI M4 chipset support in the normal area's. I would highly recommend a larger drive, though. 4G is barely enough for a decent installation of any OS.

Actually I do have an nvidia card for the lappy as well, I upgraded to the ATI chip for the 32MB of ram. The nvidia card is only 16.

Well I just scored a 32MB Nvidia card on ebay. On another note I loaded Debian earlier, man it really flies compared to the other distro's. Not sure why, but it's much faster then the others.