I have an older IBM Thinkpad that works fine, but I would like to turn it into a machine that is faster.

Because of its age, I believe that Lindows may be the best option. If I bump up to 128 MB RAM and install Lindows for Laptop with StarOffice, will I notice a significant improvement in performance?

I need a new laptop, but I would prefer to use my current equipment for as long as I can.

Let me know your thoughts.

"I believe that Lindows may be the best option"

Ahhhhh.. the horror... it burns us! it burns us it does! ahhhhh!!!!....
/me shudders violently

Ok, now that that's over with... god, outta wash your mouth out with soap for saying wnidows was the best option... how horrid... those words, in that sentance... together...

Your best option is to pick up/download a copy of an old distro. Something as old as Redhat 4-5... Suse or Mandrake in the same area of version numbers. Or, for a modern distro, to just follow through with a gentoo install, all the way from a several day install of a stage 1, and pick a light window manager and other software which the computer should be able to keep up with given the nice optomized environment.

He said Lindows, or I guess Linspire now.
http://www.linspire.com/

Yes I know, but Lindows is even worse than Windows

Thanks for the advice. I have bought a copy of Redhat 5.0 and I will give that a try. Any suggestion on the amount of RAM I should add?

For what it's worth:

I am using SuSE 9 Pro on a Dell Inspiron 3000, 266mhz, 128 megs of ram, and a 4 gig hard drive, dual booted with windows 98se. It loaded great, the only problems being that it has consumed about 75% of the 2.5 gigs alloted for it, and so far I can't get the sound card working. It tends to be a bit slow, but for a newbie like me to get my feet wet, it is working good. I get to play in both the CLI world as well as the GUI world, and am, hopefully, learning something at the same time.

Um, ricstamps... if you only thing that Suse 9.0 pro on a 266mhz is, "a bit slow"... you really need to see what fast is

I use Suse 9.0 pro... but, I compiled a 2.6.5 kernel, had KDE 3.2.2 recompile itself.. as many things as I can compile on my own I do. Because the suse packages are extremely bloated and slow...

I was using Gentoo for a while. Had a hard drive problem and didnt want to tie up the computer till I got 2004.0 downloaded and ready, so put suse on again... but

While I'm using gentoo on this thing.. a PIII 1100Mhz laptop with 512 ram, my normal boot time when the machines good n cold, is 27 seconds... That's fully loaded, ready to go, runlevel 5 and into Kde 3.2.1...

Suse takes about.. 75-90 seconds to hit that point with my replaced kernel and compiled kde, and about 140-170 seconds with the standard install... note, my laptop is a model with a Desktop PIII and has an overheating problem that causes it to slow down when its doing heavy work So its not suse's fault..

Anyway, my rambling point was that, yeah. It might seem "a bit" slow if you've not used much linux. But it tends to wear on you over time, if you stuck something older on you'd say... My god this things fast! lol

This exchange has taught me one thing.....Redhat for Dummies.....I will run, not walk to Borders to get that book. One thing, will a book like that serve me well if I am using an older iteration of Redhat?