its made by compaq
about 128 mb of ram
i installed ubuntu 9.10 and freezes after i drag anything outside a widnow...well the screen not the actual computer.

Try Fedora Core 4. That distribution works very well on the computer that I have and that is about 4 years old now.

will the installation be a problem?
right now i have no internet (im using wifi on a netbook)
so i will have to do the installation via flashdrive...if possible.

any links on the iso file??

128megs of ram by todays standard is too low and the distributions of today with either Gnome or KDE should be resource hogs. You need something that will take less of physical memory. Processor should not be much of problem is you are doing regular word processing, web browsing and sort, though older and slower processor would mean lower performance.
If you like Ubuntu, then you should look for its official fork using XFCE called Xubuntu. It should be much lighter on resources. You can also have minimal install of major distributions as well like Debian and then add XFCE for x windows. Other than that you can have Puppy, Tiny Core, or Dream Linux, which is a Debian based distribution with XFCE.

Fedora Core 4? It should be grand dad by now. There are much newer distributions that should work on that machine. Why to try an old and unsupported distribution without even trying a newer version.

i will only be using it for tasks like burning cds some word processing but mostly web browsing and downloading.
thats about all i do.

You should be able to use all of the distributions I have mentioned for this purpose. Are you using internet via wireless ?

yeah, im using internet via wireless.
i can wait to download the iso files at school where my connection is at at around 144mps
right now im using "linksys" and run at around 1mps-5.5mps
extremely lame but better than no internet,
i will try to dreamlinux it looks like it ill work on my computer. it meets the minimums.

Dream Linux is a fine distribution with nice looks and low resource needs. I have used it a bit on newer compaq laptop but it did not install wireless drivers. But I suspect it was due to a new laptop. If you really have a old lappy it should be fine and wireless should work out of the box.
I do not have either the laptop with me here in the office neither I have the Dream Linux live cd. But I can try it again once I am back home and post it to you if some couple of years old lappy wireless works or not.

thanks for the help.
the wireless driver wont be necessary.
ill be installing it on my home desktop.

im on a school issued netbook right now running pendrive ubuntu 8.04 which runs like a beauty with all desktop effects.
its a dell latitiude 2100 with 2 gigs of ram.

If you would be running Dream on desktop then you can go ahead.