Well, like DR stated, we'd need to know the specs of your machine before going much further. Are you running a Pentium chip, AMD, amount of RAM, etc. Linux will work farily well on older machines, as long as you don't clog the machine with a bunch of options and such that you don't need. Heck, I've got a copy of Red Hat 7.2 running on a Pentium 1, 200Mhz box and it runs fairly well...

So, get back to us with your specs and then we could go from there..