Best distro for old gateway laptop.
 

What would be the best linux distro for a 233 mhz, 32MB ram, old gateway laptop?
Or would i be better off using windows 2000, which it came with?

32MB of ram is a little short for most window managers... I just put Xubuntu on a PIII 450MHz 256MB dell over the weekend with no issues, though it was grinding away using swap space for everything. If you're not afraid of some involved work, I'd almost steer you towards FreeBSD and then throw Enlightenment (window manager) on it, but that's arguably a lot of work. You should try a CD of Elive, see how that runs (http://www.elivecd.org). Unfortunately Elive is quasi-closed source (donation required for an actual install).

There are a few distros that will fit in the 32 meg memory space but you will have to try them and they will require some work.

Tiny Core

Slackware

and I think if you check distro watch you could find a couple of others, But as listed in post #2 you will be limited.

This old laptop does not even have an ethernet card (tinycore is mostly online), and i dont even care if it is graphical (i know how to use a command line). I just want something other than windows that i can do a little programing on.

there is always that question which is best. A few that comes to mind at this time that work are:
Puppy
Damn Small Linux
Slackware without GUI, if you want to go that route
Knoppix (once installed will become a Debian system)
That was to just name a few. All of which are minimal in nature and have some degree of flexibility. Of course any distro without a GUI will work.