I have tried All the current versions of Linux Mint and Ubuntu and all current Puppy distros and this certain thing keeps happening.
It loads up fine, I am able to go to the start menu and download certain things like flash or Chrome and fire fox. But then I actually start web browsing and it freezes and crashes. Ending up in a cross diagonal mess that kind of looks like a television channel gone nuts in the old rabbit ears antenna days.
I have one of those thin Dell PC"s
An Inspirion 531S
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Duel Core Processor 5600+ 2.90ghz
4 gigs of ram
And it is running Vista 32gb Home Premium.
Please help. I am at wits end

hello,
can you please give the outputs of "lshw" or any commands where we can see the hardware content? (inxi, lspci, lsusb, dmesg.. see the net which command to use for listing the hardware inside your machine).
Personally, I would bet on a grafic card driver issue. But who knows?
Vista was stable?

It can even be a memory limitation as there has been no specification for what "crash" means in this context.

Live images tend not to have swap allocated. On memory limited systems (1G or less) this will cause problems with browsing - as web pages tend to require LOTS of memory now with the tons of advertising, video/animated ads... and lots of javascript and Java.

I have 4 gigs of ram though.
Does this mean I cant run a linux distro even from a usb? I was trying to use Puppy linux since that runs on pc's that are ancient and that even does that cross diagonal thing. It doesn't crash,(As in pc shuts down) but freezes and does a cross diagonal line thingy in the colors of the page it freezes on.

No. I'm talking about the physical memory.

USB devices are treated as disks.

Your description seems to be a problem with the graphics.

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I'd use a boot time option of vesa to try.

Would that be accomplished by adding video=vesa to the kernel boot cmd-line?

Depends on the distro. Modern is nomodset. Some versions of dsl may be simply to use failsafe. Puppy has so many base distro's we'd need to know. I think that on some versions that kernel option may work. Some may need VGA=xxx number.

I agree with this, "I would bet on a grafic card driver issue", as noted by floppy_stuttgart. without knowing more I guess that the display could be equally bad.

Hi: Bx The-O:

What graphic's card do you have?

Run this to find out-