Reporting this to be merged with OP's other thread.
Please keep this saga all in one thread

I'm back: I have merged 2 threads, and reported another one to be merged. Let's keep this saga all in one place.

Parallaxis;

First, congratulations on your victory!! I wish all newbies had your tenacity.

There are at least three ways to make your system faster:
1. Upgrade the hardware--starting with the addition of another 256M of RAM
2. Optimize and tweak Xubuntu
3. Install a really lean and mean system

#1 costs money, #2 will have limited payoff for the time invested. I recommend #3.
If you go with #3, consider also Arch with various lean and mean Window managers and DEs. I now have just about ALL of them installed on at least one of my systems and I periodically log into them to experiment.

I would think a small investment of $15 to add a 256MB RAM chip to your box would be most productive. You can even find them cheeper if you want to risk buying a use one. I did however have to put a little time and effort into an internet search to find some decent RAM at that price for my old box with "about" those spects.

Currently I am using Debian Lenny on my old box like yours with 512MB of RAM and using KDE 3.5 as my "Desktop Enviorment". Occationally I feel it is a little slow but not too bad concidering that KDE is often refered to as a "heavy weight" DE. It has been my experiance that Debian Lenny with KDE 3.5 runs conciderably faster than any of the Ubuntu releases I have tried (although, I haven't used the one just released). Anything with KDE 4.x is pretty well out though for my old box. If I upgrade to the next Debian release (wen it is availibe) I will have to use LXDE for "reasonable" performance.

Damn, Damn, Damnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well now that the melodrama is out of the way.....

I REALLY like Xubuntu, and it DOES work.

I've been playing around with it some more tonight and according to the little system monitoring program that came with it...

My CPU maxs out at near 100% just using it!
(Interesting though it only uses about 70mb of my 256mb RAM)

It doesn't slow down till I open Firefox, that's when it hits the wall.

However, I downloaded Google Chrome and Chrome must use ALOT less resources because it becomes barely usable, or atleast alot more usable than Firefox.

I think maybe Google Chrome should be packed with the system instead of Firefox since it seems to run so much better.

Anyway.....

I guess Xubuntu isn't going to work.
It's a shame, I do like it.

I'm not sure where to go from here.

I wish Xubuntu had worked well enough. I really do.

People have suggested some kind of light window management system. I'm not really sure what that means. I don't won't to be typing in a bunch of DOS style commands just to open an internet browser. I also need something that's going to easily run Firefox or Chrome, as well as different plugins for the browser - ie: Flash is a must.

So..... yeah......

Try Openbox, but with Xfce's taskbar (but not the rest of Xfce).

Enter this command:

Log out.

When logging in, you should see a drop-down menu in the login screen. Choose Openbox instead of Xfce. When you log in, you will have a black screen. Right-click and open a terminal or xterm from there. In that terminal, run this command:

Now you will have Openbox with Xfce's taskbar.

I also might suggest you try the Midori browser. That's what I am using right now!

Wait, we're blowing past my user level here.

Enter that first command where?

And is Midori on my system? Wikipedia says it's part of Xfce, but I don't remember seeing it in Xubuntu...

You enter commands in a Terminal.

Midori is not yet part of Xfce.

ok, I've seen that.
I'll check it out, but first it's time for LOST!

OK!

I'm back with more information.

I tried what MTK358 said. It worked.

I did get a error message...
(xfce4-panel: 2200): Wnck-WARNING Unhandled action type _OB_WM_Action_Undecorate
... and I noticed that all the menus went away when I closed the terminal box.

But whatever. It doesn't matter.
There wasn't that much of a performance boost.

With the Openbox thing the CPU idled at about 20-30 percent
With Xubuntu fully loaded it idled at about 10 percent more, give or take.

The problem is when opening Chrome in both instances the CPU load jumped up to 100%.

So I was going to try this Midori browser, but I'm having trouble installing it.

I read the install instructions, went to the Midori file, opened a terminal and typed ./x oh I forget, whatever it said to type, and I got this response...

A bunch of checking for program errors: not found
Then in red letters 'The program msgfmt(gettext) is mandatory


Oh and on another note...
In that log in box there were several other options....
GNOME/OPENBOX
Openbox Session
XFCE Session
Xterm
Xubuntu Session

What all do they do?

Maybe try BrowserLinux:
http://www.browserlinux.com

Keep in mind however that regardless of your choice of distro, windows manager, web browser, etc., it is your 500mhz processor that seems to be the bottleneck.

^
I know. That sucks.

Suggestions are welcome.
If I could just cut everything else but the browser out and have a very minimalist but functional browser running, well I don't know.

The reason you use community support is that everyone who posts has at least an idea of what they're doing

Regarding the speed, double check that you have the RAM and swap that you expect. In a terminal run free. That will show how much memory there is total, used, free and also show Swap. I have had times where my swap did not load and things were bad.

It is ALWAYS best to try installing software by your package manager before even thinking of getting it from the official website and manually installing it.

What exactly is your point?

Many, many, people who come here for the first time have NO idea what they are doing----they are here for our help.