Reccomend A Distro Based On My Needs

[Wolfmight]

Not sure what distro i need, but i'm looking for one that:

-Uses less resources than windows xp
-More stable and less lag than windows xp
-able to browse/open from many MP3s, Video, DivX, Flash, Images,and MSWord Documents very quickly and without any crashes.
-Supports faster thumbnail loading than windows xp for large amount of media in a single folder.
-support for Yahoo, AIM, and MSN messengers (or 2 of them atleast)
-able to run wine (just in case)
-supports Bittorrent, eMule, Kazaa (or 2 of them atleast)
-supports reading of other partions besides my windows os partion, so i can browse My Documents, etc.

which one should i go with?

[LSA]

Every distro can do that.

[Wolfmight]

which one uses less resources and cpu processing:
Redhat or Mandrake.

Those seem to be two good ones.

[Xero Grid]

I haven't been in this section for a while. :P

It may not depend on what distro.
Red Hat and Mandrake are very similar in many ways. I believe Mandrake started out as being based on Red Hat. Picking Red Hat may be a bad idea since it is no longer supported (I'm not even sure the Red Hat mirrors are still up). Mandrake, which has many improvements including having the 2.6 kernel, may be the way to go.

What may be more to consider is your desktop environment. Of course the most popular being KDE and Gnome. In my experience, KDE uses more resources, but has more features. But, there are much lighter desktop environments which may not be as popular, such as IceWM (Ice Window Manager).
Review on IceWM (http://www.linuxcompatible.org/article12.html)
IceWM website (http://www.icewm.org/)

But there are others... you can go without graphics at all, if you like. :lol:

-- Xero Grid --

[shn]

icewm sucks.

The baddest of all lightweight windowmanagers is Enlightenment (http://enlightenment.org). Fluxbox and xfce are ok. Fvwm is nice and very lightweight if you use the fvwm-themes then it's almost as good as enlightenment. Most of thoose windowmanagers are for experienced linux users that know what their doing. KDE and Gnome are desktops and therefore 10 times more bloated. Best thing to do is to use something like the one's above and compile it with kde or gnome support that way you still have application extentions for kde and gnome but minus the bloat.

@Wolfmight -- Just get a distro and run it dude. You can take any distro and make it run just as efficient as any other. The distro wars are overrated I think now.

[LSA]

This article may help you a bit.

http://www.thejemreport.com/modules.php?op...article&sid=123 (http://www.thejemreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=123)