Dude, the link I posted has all the necessary instructions for getting your card to work.

I like Ubuntu a lot and if I didn't play Sims, I would have used it instead of XP. =/

For someone who plays games compatible with it or just surfs the web and such, it's a really good OS and big plus, it's FREE. Easy to install stuff and even if you have issues, search help forums, tap a few commend lines and everything is fine.

Plus well there's also iso's and roms... >:3

Compiz is great with all the nice effects....

I'm also enjoying many Games I newer heard of and found them
in the Package Manager. Chromium is great, also some FPS's, and
RPG's, so at least i can play something when i'm out of the house and
can't access my ps3...

I do web design and software for web development is great, Screem for HTML,
Gimp, Inkscape, all great tools!!

I can't believe you are a very good web developer if this is the case unless you have another box or two laying around with Windows on.

Claiming to be a web developer while locking yourself out of testing IE6/IE7/Safari (depending on WINE's current mood and the alignment of the stars) is absurd so I hope I'm misinterpreting that.

Anyway, good luck with 'buntu.  It's a neat ride.  Try out Fedora and OpenSuSE if you're up for something a bit more exciting.  YaST, in particular, is a pain at times but pretty fun to play with.

I didnt lock myself out of anything....
I just installed Ubuntu onto my laptop, chill....

the moment we get steam on linux i am dupping windows.
but getting steam would mean wine would have be able to run all the windows games with no hacks.

I just installed Windows XP on Ubuntu using Vmware, just to check out how would my web sites work...

I installed MSIE 4,5,6,7 on it, using a software that installed all of those versions on one Windows
and it's working the same as it is in my real Windows machine....

So, i guess this could be used for testing, i checked some forums and there
people are saying that this is ideal for web developers or programmers to test stuff..

Please correct me if i'm wrong (i am a linux newbie)...

welcome to the Linux community, its good and cheap and friendly!

1) the only 2 downsides to Linux... incompatibility with most mainstream software releases unless you buy window/linux softwares

2) some wi-fi driver problems. usually fine once you download ndiswrapper (on the ubuntu CD) and use that to install your wi-fi card driver. Easy once you know how.

all i need now is to decorate my old laptop with some linux stickers!

well 512 MB is prolly what is choking the system down. 1GB is more to XP's liking. maybe you have lots of spyware, bloatware? those bog down ur system a lot.. regular defrag, running a low memory intensive background programs( stuff like norton takes over 40-50 MB, Itunes does the same- since the OS needs 200 MB atleast.. you can see how your running out of memory quickly- will slow down performance.. since your forcing windows to use disc caching/virtual mem. you might have a lot of temp files/ viruses? try running ccleaner/spybot.

Your specs sound OK to me. Not too shabby but not too fast either. Overall XP is a pretty fast OS, much quicker than vista. good luck with linux though

Well there you go! Your computer is OLD... That RAM is horrible and so is the HDD...no wonder it ran slow! It almost has the same specs as my friend's PC (she has only 128MB of RAM, but same HDD). Her dad has to do a 'clean' every few months because her computer runs horribly slow. She even tells me that she has a hard time watching stuff on YouTube and our IM conversations always lag.

But congrats on getting Linux. I have nothing else to say other than I don't prefer stuff that's made by multiple people and they are told it is guaranteed that it will be better than Windows...but still, the only reason why your PC ran slow with Windows was because of you processor, RAM and HDD.