Thank you for the advice, so far I've narrowed down 2 potential candidates when considering the PC's specs: debian and emmabuntus. The problem is the live USB isn't working (works fine on another laptop), and even lighter distros don't seem to be able to boot via the live USB method. Whenever i try i get this message:
Isolinux.bin missing or corrupt. (twice)
Operating System not found

I don't think i'll bother paying for blank DVDs just to try an alternative methods to get an OS on this PC, seems hardly worth the effort, but unfortunately i'm stuck here.

Just want to keep it alive and kickin for the sake of it lol, just to see if i can and to try another distro

Ideally i'd like for it to be able to have an internet connection, otherwise i'll just keep the Windows XP that's on it. So far I'm looking at debian and emmabuntus, they seem to match the specs just right

I don't know if 512MB of RAM will be adequate for most live USB/CD, so I wouldn't bother with it. You don't need a live USB to do a normal install. The Debian installer doesn't need so much RAM anyway:

https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Thank you for the link. Reading the Installation Howto it says it's a 64 bit version, do you happen to have a link for a 32 bit? Also not sure which link i would click so if you could please be more specific as to the steps i should follow I'd really appreciate it, as i don't have an internet connection on the Fujitsu Siemens so i'd still need to transfer it somehow. Thank you for all your help

Thank you to everyone that has taken an interest in helping me out with this, if i don't reply to a quote it's just because I don't want to repeat myself in the thread, but i greatly appreciate everyone's input

I'm sorry, I gave the wrong link! That one's for the daily builds, not the Debian 12 (Bookworm) installer.

The correct link for Debian 12 (Bookworm) is here:

https://www.debian.org/releases/book...ian-installer/

I recommend the netinst CD (it's a small iso) - you want to click on the i386 download for 32 bit.

You'd be better off with Antix, as someone suggested earlier. With 32-bit version you're just barely over 100MB used to boot into X, as they use a custom i486 kernel and simple window manager (that they've configured very well for you) and simple init system. That leaves you plenty of memory for a browser tab or two in firefox.

https://cytranet.dl.sourceforge.net/...3_386-base.iso

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User only has 512MB RAM so will not be able to do much with firefox.

No, but there are other browsers that will work well enough on most sites. (Hello Dillo!)

I did suggest only one or two tabs. Which will be fine. Even with 256MB like my Antix test VM it's usable. I used to have 512mb on my P4 and browsed just fine, but now up to 1GB as someone was throwing out an old machine and I took their ram.

I find it odd you (as antix lead dev) are the one saying this too, you think something would be better for their use case than Antix?

I do not see the resource usage and constrains issues of Mozilla on limited hardware being an AntiX issue at all. The best case here would be a somewhat more modern platform with better resources, but if you want to make this work (I would) then you need to have (and set) reasonable expectations.

Let's see what @johnnylanza has to say.

That sounds like a corrupt image to me. If I had this problem, I would do a fresh download of the image and check the hash before booting from it.

Sounds to me like need to write it with dd to a usb flash drive.