I've searched around for a similar thread on these boards but couldn't find one. Sorry if this is a common question.

I have a Fujitsu 270dx laptop that I've recently been given. Pure atticware.

200 MHz Pentium MMX
2.1 gig hard drive
I've upgraded the 16 megs of ram up to 82 megs
It has a floppy drive and a cd-rom. Unsure at this point if the cd-rom is boot-able.

right now it has Windows 95 on it.

I'd like to run this as a laptop for school, which means I only need to run programs that can access:

MS Word
MS Excel
Wireless Internet
AOL IM

I know that using what little system resources I have is critical, so I've looked to distros that make it their business to trim away bloat. So far I'm considering Feather Linux and Damn Small Linux. My questions are:

Has anyone had experience working with "atticware"?
Which distro is the best for a noob?
Are there any others I should consider?
What distros should I stay away from due to hardware limitations?
Are there any considerations that I'm not taking into account?
What programs are best given my configuration limitations to accomplish what I'd like to?

Thanks in advance for taking a look at this!

Hi

I have a old 300MHz Pentium II. I have installed Slackware on it and it runs great. The system never crashes and it has all the utilities I need.

If you need a distro that will work on old hardware, pick SLACKWARE!

Stay away from distros that use KDE or GNOME.
DSL or feather are both fine. Some others I can think of are Puppy, Beatrix, Vector.

If I was to run Feather or DSL, would I be capable of running OpenOffice on this laptop as well?

yes, you could use apt-get to install open-office and gaim.