Formating after botched installation
 

What I have is a Compaq Evo D300 mini-tower. I tried istalling Ubuntu on it, but the installation failed and seems to have clogged my hard drive.

What I want to do, is first to format the disc, then to install the strongest user-friendly Linux that will fit my machine.

I am currently getting by with Puppy 4.3.1. After Yahoo upgraded their e-mail, it works only badly with what I have; and seemingly I cannot get Firefox to mate(?) with it.

With (almost) any Linux installer you can choose where to install the operating system -- you just tell it to use the whole disk and overwrite the current install. I would recommend Linux Mint to a new user but if Ubuntu failed to install then you may find the same problem with Linux Mint as it is based upon it though without knowing how and why the install failed that's just speculation.

That model came with a small memory by today's standards: 128 or 256 MB. Did you upgrade and, if so, to how much? That's obviously a vital question. Tell me what you've got and I'll tell you what will run (out of the 112 distros I know!) I think you have motherboard graphics, but if you have an added graphics card that will improve things: otherwise some of the RAM is grabbed for graphics.

Does Puppy have Gparted by default? If not, you can download it and examine your disk, and reformat if necessary. Actually, most distros will do that with their installer.

Yahoo is a problem for older computers. This one is comparable to yours, but with 1MB RAM, and I find Yahoo's become unusable, even with Opera. I ended by finding alternatives to the Yahoo groups I belonged to (mostly better, in the event), and quitting Yahoo for good.

I have the evo 500 with the p4 2.53 g processor 512 ram and it will not run Ubuntu or Mint kde. You can use
lubuntu on it nicely. There are several different distros for low resources machines.

I know for a fact that CentOS 5 will run just fine with 512 meg ram and a p4 cpu

however Firefox and youtube might have some memory issues

please post your hardware specs .