The thing is Windows XP, with all its warts, will still run comfortably on a 6 or 8 year PC that was low-end when it was new. A few weeks ago, when my wife's old XP computer finally wouldn't boot anymore I got a new hard drive and tried to run Ubuntu on it. Couldn't even get through the installer without it freezing up. Lubuntu installed but wasn't stable.
OpenBSD with KDE was pretty good, and I would have stayed with that but lucked out and was able to get a clean low-level copy of the old hard drive to a new one using 'dd' and get back to the original system.
Ubuntu seems horribly bloated, and the installation takes forever. Try Knoppix livecd, they have a pretty quick program to flash the installation to an external usb. Plus you can get all the latest debian packages.
On the contrary I believe Ubuntu installation process is straight forward and fast. But the os may be a bit bloated. At least with the newest additions of Amazon integration.
I'm running the latest Linux Mint on an old Dell XPS M1330 (Centrino Duo and 2GB Ram, end of 2007) and it runs quite well.
Ubuntu is too heavy for an old machine like the one you're talking about, try Mint
Good that you could restore the old system, but as others have said depending on the graphics card Ubuntu stock may not be the best candidate for installing on a low spec machine.
I'd go for CentOS in that situation with the Stella repositories for multimedia, but would also consider Debian Wheezy XFCE4. As others have suggested one of the Mint flavours might work well.
Having said that, Debian Wheezy 'full fat' with Gnome 3/Shell works fine on this X60 manufactured in December 2006 and fitted with 1Gb of RAM. Admittedly, that was not a low end machine when it was manufactured.
>> few weeks ago, when my wife's old XP computer finally wouldn't boot anymore I got a new hard drive and tried to run Ubuntu on it.
>> Couldn't even get through the installer without it freezing up.
It sounds like the machine may have had additional issues. I ran Ubuntu 7.04 - 12.04 on my 2005 machine until this year and could really have made it another year or two but thought it was time to treat myself to an upgrade.
If you need to try that again have a look at Mint XFCE, I run version 15 on a 1.4Ghz Celeron-M with 1.25Gb RAM and it is usable for surfing and writing (it's an old Thinkpad R50 and the keyboard on it is so much better than my i5/16Gb Vostro that I often use it for longer documentation).
Try building up from ubuntu minimal instead. I've had a lot of luck going that route with older hardware. It does require access to a wired connection though.
OpenBSD with KDE was pretty good, and I would have stayed with that but lucked out and was able to get a clean low-level copy of the old hard drive to a new one using 'dd' and get back to the original system.