My Dell Latitude D610 with 256MB Ram and 1ghz processor, no longer boots from cd.

I mean, it does boot, but it just gets to a point where it just hangs, I tried the microsoft xp installation disk and it hangs at where it says "looking for other installations of winfows"

And with Beini OS it just hangs after pressing enter for normal boot mode...
The reason I am posting this here, is that I want to somehow get a Debian or something else working on this laptop , but I Think I only have once chance or so, because before screwing my windows installation, i've installed plop boot manager to the mbr, and now all i am left with is some usb live booting, which is from where i am writing now, a puppy linux live usb..
It works awesome, but kinda hangs up because the usb is 1.0 i guess...

SO how can I install Debian (or you suggest me some light distro for my specifications), being 100% sure that, If I rewrite the MBR, I will get it right?

Oh, and also, if it matters, when i installed windows, as I thought shit happens, I left like 9 or 10GB of unpartitioned space, I don't know if it is possible to do something just with that space? (Like i don't know, install debian just there without modifying mbr, but just the windows boot loader or something.. I don't know pretty much how that works..)

I know I wrote a lot but please help me :C
Thank you alot!

My guess:

a) burn knoppix, archbang, lubuntu on CDs and try a CD boot again in order to verify the affirmation "it cannot boot from CD". a UBCD start in your CD reader?

b) if you installed puppy on an usb, you know how to install debian on an usb?
Then, boot to that usb and install Debian on your HDD? (and screw all old things which are on it...)

c) connect your HDD on another PC and install the OS on it from that other PC

d) if it has a floppy disk, boot plop from there..

If I remember, I installed already TinyCoreLinux on that type of machine (boot from CD reader with the "UBCD", hoose the menu "HDD""boot manager""plop", boot TinyCoreLinux from USB, install it onto the HDD). But I had a working CD reader (just for starting plop and not for loading the whole operating system).

Does this have a floppy drive? Do you have a usb cd drive?

I'd start with memtest maybe. Does it run and show correct amount of ram?