<p>That's more than likely because of the choice of desktop. If you're using KDE or Gnome, that's a heavy weight of processing to put on top of an older machine. Instead of the heavy desktops, you could choose to use one of the lightweight desktops (XFCE) or eschew a desktop completely and go for a very lightweight window manager (fluxbox, blackbox, windowmaker or even fvwm2). You can still use the applications that belong to the big desktops, but you don't have the overheads associated with them.</p>
<p>Most distros let you choose your desktop. When you boot up, at the point where you login with your password, somewhere on that screen there is usually a button or menu option to choose your desktop. Try XFCE and see if that is snappier with your hardware. I would recommend XFCE. But if that is still too slow, try the window managers like fluxbox or windowmaker, but then you have more configuration to do yourself.</p>
<p>If you want to dig deeper, go to <a href="http://distrowatch.com" rel="nofollow">http://distrowatch.com</a> and look down the right column at the ranked list of distros, and click on each distro and see which desktops they come with.</p>
