Wow!, what a great set of responses thank you all for your input. I will definetely look into slackware.

dunix I am using SimplyMepis 8 now and it does work well except I can't get the sound to work, so one of the options I am considering is going back to 7 which worked flawlessly and was in my opininon faster (although some people disagree with that). I just didn't like the outdated firefox and thunderbird.

Thanks again to all responders.

I disagree somewhat with most of the previous posts. I ran ubuntu 8.04 on an old compaq armada with a 650MHz Pentium 3 and never experienced any serious performance problems. I did have the ram maxed out at 512MB. If you can up the ram in your laptop any modern linux distro will probably work acceptably. You may not be able to run all the popular special video effects depending on specific hardware.

True, performance won't be as quick as with some of the lightweight distros mentioned, but it may be a fair tradeoff for your needs.

Are you set on KDE? It's got a rep for being more resource hungry.

My laptop is 800Mhz Celeron, 256Mb Ram and 20GB hard drive. I run Ubuntu 9.04 using ext4 (available as an option during install), with a few programs removed from startup (bluetooth, evolution) and with automatic updates turned off. Other than that, it's stock, and it runs fine.

Resources is what your aiming to keep high or you will tax your cpu...

BSD is an option ,but I don't know your user level and for me to suggest

SLACKWARE, BSD, DEBIAN or any no graphical install would be a bad idea...

You could also consider...

Ubuntu with e17 or one windows managers...

Arch linux...

Maryan Linux...

Puppy Linux..

OpenSolaris

Gos...

CrunchBang Linux

you could even use a netbook remix....

there are a total of 147 different distro's you could use and probably more... at distrowatch.com

Slackware's installer's pretty easy to work with, and I think Debian's is similar.
I've seen some low-resource machines fail with graphical installers.

why hasnt anyone recommended ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala?

its a good update from the 9.04 version and works better on netbooks, even with compiz

Thanks to all responders...will make a choice soon.

I think even netbooks have CPUs that are faster than 700MHz. Not by much, though.

Generally for operating systems, you want to stay a version behind.
(unless you want to simulate the crashes and errors of windows

woops, my bad....

Yeh the more i use 9.10 the more im searching into other distros lol

speed is fine but there are some teething problems that you can notice. One that is worrying me now is when streaming clips or big pages with lots of pics. It gets jerky and with the streaming clips the screen sometimes flashes in some places. Makes me feel like im damaging my netbook! :/

Well, as you can see, all you'll get from your question is an laundry list of distributions.

Simply be selective when you make your installation: don't install "everything." And let's face it: "underpowered," these days, is a very relative term.

No one has suggested lxde-slackware (or ubuntu9.10)?
I am running lxde slackware13 on a nb100 toshiba netbook and it runs like a rabbit.

My son has just been given an IBM R30 thinkpad-1Ghz cpu 256MBram 10GB hdd. I opted to install xubuntu 9.10, as it was the easiest approach with a CD drive. (It would not boot from a USB stick). I then installed lxde from the repository and deleted xfce. Xfce does not work well with only 256MB of ram. After using slackware for 9months, I am now about to replace Ubuntu on this old notebook. Slackware knowledge remains consistent, where as Ubuntu changes from one edition to the next. My son will have to learn slackware.

This could easily turn into a which distro is best flame war. On that note I am a Debian based guy, but I try a lot of distros. I have an old Dell Latitude C800, 866Mhz, 512MB Ram, and 20GB HDD with 32MB Video. I found Fluxbuntu worked great but I don't know if it is still around. Kubuntu was ok, Suse did ok. Right now I have Debian Lenny 32 bit with XFCE running on it. I didn't really enjoy slackware too much so I didn't really give it a fair go. Never try BSD or gentoo.

Right now all I am using it for is to browse the web, remotely accessing my other machines and servers, or a scripting/coding box. Most of the time if I do scripting I do it locally but coding I usually do that remotely through SSH.

On an older machine I like kubuntu and fluxbuntu a lot. Made the machine a decent machine again.

My bid...

http://wiki.dennyhalim.com/opensuse-minimal-desktop