[peteevans]

As mentioned by others lubuntu and xubuntu are fairly lightweight and I've used ubuntu variants on netbooks in the past and where reasonably fast. From ubuntu server you should be able to install the different desktops anyway, but seems a slightly harder route! Saying that look to the browser, chrome tends to be memory hungry, due to multiple processes, and firefox is heading (headed?) that way, which tends to be bad on limited resource computers. I'm finding firefox slow on my old laptop now. There are some other views here http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-lightweight-linux-distros-ide...