Good news! I'm typing this on the old laptop, in Firefox 3, running XUbuntu.

The OS is nice and fast and applications load quickly and don't suffer from the bad lag all other distros of Linux have done when I've tested them before on slow systems with limited ram and slow cpu's. And when using most applications the cpu load is only around 25-35% and the ram about 84mb used of the 128mb total.

The OS does take a bit of time to boot. I've not timed it yet but it is over a minute I think. And the OS took about an hour to install from CD, but it installed first time without any trouble.

The only stumbling block I had was with the Linksys PCMCIA wireless network card I have plugged into this laptop. The OS didn't have supported drivers for it, which is actually the case with all versions of Linux at the moment and many Wi-Fi lan cards. Luckily as I've encountered this before I already knew about the ndiswrapper utility that allows you to install windows drivers for network cards. The Xubuntu site has a very good tutorial page on installing and setting this up. And ndiswrapper is already included with the OS, and the Xubuntu install CD has all but one of the 3 additional files needed. It also didn't require all of the commandline work that was previously needed as I installed the ndiswrapper gui and that did the lot for me without needing to ask. I just had to select the windows driver's .inf file and it installed it. I then just rebooted, entered by WEP key and it was connected.