I’m posting this from my 700mhz pentium III using ubuntu live. It’s taken a while, but vista pushed me over the edge. I’m getting my wife a new laptop and loading ubuntu and Open office. I’m even dumping XP Pro on this machine. If I can get cakewalk sonar to work with Wine on my studio PC, I’ll be taking xp pro off that one as well.
If you find Ubuntu to be too bloated, try Xubuntu. It uses a lighter desktop environment but is still as functional as Ubuntu. Xubuntu is my distro of choice. I’d recommend Xubuntu 8.04 over Xubuntu 8.10 because not only is 8.04 supported for 36 months while 8.10 is supported for 18 months, but 8.10 is sluggish compared to 8.04. 8.04 is pretty fast on this nearly 4 year old laptop.