I'm going to wipe my hard drive over Christmas break since I'm having some trouble with my OS (Yes, it's WinBlows) and was curious which dist was best for my uses. My current configuration:

I have a Toshiba 7140 that uses a docking station.
- 6 GB HDD (Should I upgrade?)
- 190 MB RAM
My home's network is cat-5.
I have a Palm OS PDA that I will need to be able to sync.
At school I use a 802.11B wireless PC Card to connect to the 'net and check email.
My wife has a Windows PC on which all our documents are stored
- This is important since I use "briefcase" to sync new and updated documents to her PC. If Linux doesn't, yet, have an equivalent to this, I'll need a WinBlows partition so that I can do that.

So, there it is. Which distribution would be best for me? Any suggestions for partitioning my relatively small HDD would be helpful, as well.

I've just purchased a Toshiba Satellite P30 (17") and I'll receive it in 12-15 days. (That's what toshiba direct says anyway)

Well; first of all ; back up all of your important information to CDs. (Hopefully yours has a cdw)

I would first say to try Knoppix; if everything is quite working with it ; you can use any debian-based distro. Mepis and Ubuntu are perhaps easiest to install ; but I've heard debian is quite good on laptops.

On the other hand, also d/l a live suse if knoppix doesn't work quite right ; I know that suse is working quite nice on my mom's sony vaio laptop. (I installed it, she's very happy with it and never screwed it up.)

If not; also download Slax which is a live version of slackware. Slackware is customizable towards anything if you know what you're doing.

But at the end; you might be most happy with debian based distros or debian ; since you can download any program you want from their libraries using apt-get. (Synaptic in your experience I assume)

Have fun ! I'll first try to install gentoo and see if it works; if not I'll probably go for debian as well.