low ram
 

mom my has this old laptop she got from her job and it was running windows 98 i think but i wiped the hd and installed xp and found that it moves much more slowly than her 98 moved so does anyone know a version of linux that requirs a low level of ram (64mb to be exact) and a slow cpu that still have all the features such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and excel type feature because my mom will be using this as a work from home computer

This has been discussed many times -- a quick search of this site will help a great deal. Mostly, keep well away from KDE/Gnome (just use XFCE, Fluxbox or IceWM as the window manager) and don't install anything you won't need. A minimal installation of Debian would be fine, though the same could be said of most distributions.

Cheers,

mj