hi
since you seem open to other distros.....we can see the size of your hard drive....but can you post the specs of your RAM and do you use wired (ethernet) or wireless to connect to the net?......if wirelesss name your device please.
There a number of live cds....you could try but with a 4.7 G drive I would think tinier and less bloatware is the way to go.
Therefore avoid.....bloatware desktop environments like kde and gnome.....avoid larger software sets like openoffice and choose abiword and gnumeric
and since I am giving advice you are free to ignore....I suggest you look at LXDE and run it on tinycore?
Tinycore is a 11 Meg download but likely to give you issues if you have wireless.....it runs in RAM and you download what extensions you need.
The extensions have the "chaff" removed so man pages are low on detail.
Tinycore is a live cd and install cd. Other bigger live cds that might interest include Mepis and Linuxmint.
Here is my 2G ram system running with most applications available at boot, but I could have some placed "ondemand" if RAM was short
cat /proc/meminfo (with culling)
Code:
MemTotal: 2074548 kB
MemFree: 1891836 kB
Buffers: 18556 kB
Cached: 93820 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 72224 kB
Inactive: 71064 kB
check out
www.distrowatch.com if interested