Please Recommend a Distro for an Old Laptop

I recently bought a used Toshiba Portege 3110ct ultraportable laptop. It's stats are pretty dated, running at 300mhz with 128mb of ram. It's runs xp fine, but I'd like to know what linux distros would run well on it. I basically want this machine for taking notes, typing papers, and wifi/internet(with flash & goodies).

Right now in XP the load times for firefox are really long, it takes about 25-40 seconds to load a web browser (I tested firefox, ie, opera, & K-meleon) from a cold start and about 5-15 seconds to load one from a warm start. Would switching to a lite linux distro cut down on these times for me? Would the laptop be able to handle xubuntu or ubuntu lite as well as it handles xp? Would I notice any significant performance increase if I went to a stripped distro like DSL-N? If so, at what cost to my user experience?

Oh, also since this is an ultraportable laptop, it doesn't have a CD drive. I only have usb, I could probably buy the external cd drive for it, but would that work for booting a live cd?

So many questions, and I thank you in advance for your answers!

There are a lot of solutions for your situation - check the link in my signature for some resources to get you started.

I would suggest either damnsmall linux or puppy linux...both are small and run acceptably on 128 meg ram. and both include the basics...I would try damnsmall as I found it to install easier and there are I think more available extensions, and can use some of the debian packages via synaptic.I may be wrong but both have live cd versions to try befor installing...so you can decide..

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1