ok so I wiped out XP and installed fedora 9 and it is slow as a slug. granted i didnt insall it into a high end pc its actaully quite the opposite. but windows never ran this slow. its a emachine with about 1.5ghz and 256RAM. any distro that is fast on this type of PC? I tried ubuntu but apparently its not compatible because I cant get past the install screen.

you may be more inclined to run NOT gnome and NOT kde desktops which still leaves about 400 distros to choose from.

you may find if HCL can be searched for your motherboard and

I suggest you look for a minimal type distro such as puppy etc

check my signature for some links if interested.

sidux can be run with those specs
http://sidux.com/Article454.html

There are several things that you could try to do in this situation:

• make fedora faster
• get ubuntu to install
• find another distro

Currently your preference seems to be the latter; is that correct?

256 M ram is on the low side (partic for Gnome/KDE, which are the heavyweight GUIs), but should still be at least as fast as windows. During initial startup you may have one of several processes indexing the disk and that may be a factor in how slow it seems initially.

Puppy/dsl and similar are good suggestions. Also check out live CDs (DVDs), which allow you to try things out without installing.

on a low end( speck wise) machine i would install
puppy linux , or Damn Small Linux , or even Knoppix
or a VERY striped down fedora --no kde, --no gnome , -- no Compz, and use xfce
and do not install open office with only 256 ram ( will not run fast enough to be of ANY use).

I agree with the post before this one.

If you want Fedora, install it with nothing....no desktop, no eye candy of any kind, and maybe it will be about as peppy as XP. But Fedora doesn't give you the option to install a bare bones system, I once tried to de-select most of what it wanted to install and it still installed everything. Fedora is the biggest "PIG" I've installed as far as Linux distributions are concerned. Even Vista can out-perform Fedora as far as speed is concerned.
Debian is the fastest Linux with a robust desktop like KDE or Gnome, as long as you don't accept the default installation like Fedora or Ubuntu. With Debian you can start with a bare bones system and just add the apps and services you want while keeping a lean mean machine.
Mac OS X (Hackintosh) also runs faster than Fedora.

Red Hat is all about "Enterprise". Which means "We're looking for money, not groupies, we got enough of them and they don't pay". And Red Hat realizes that there are many business owners out there too cheap to invest in their company. To get them interested in spending the bucks in the "Enterprise", Red Hat offers their testing platform called "Fedora" for free. So what!.. if it's a little slower than the competition, it'll do the job and most every job you throw at it. And your employees won't be looking to install games to play all day because they barely have enough time to get their job done in time 'cause their using Red Hat.

Try Puppy Linux or one of its sub distros like MacPup. http://www.macpup.org/. I often install Puppy to low spec machines and it runs really fast.

Puppy rocks and should run just fine on your machine.