Well... that was fun. After testing many different live cd's i have settled on xandros 3 deluxe. Its the only one i could get all perfs to work. Seems a little bulky but it's ok.
The notebook is a IBM i series. It has a celeron 500 p3 with 128 mb ram and a 10 gig harddrive.
Nothing to shout about but still a working laptop.
The speed seems pretty quick so far. It took forever to get all the updates and patches installed. It even has crossover office on it. They havent got office 2003 to work on it yet though. Im going to oninstall open office 1.1 and install 2.0 shortly to see how it is.