Recently I have been using a new operating on my PC. It's called Slax and it is a Linux distribution that runs on a USB Data Stick or a CD-ROM, so it can be run without having to install anything on the PC's hard drive and can be taken to any PC that can boot from CD-ROM or a USB Data Stick. In these days of operating systems taking up gigbytes of space on a hard drive it is nice to have a system that is only a 190mb download.
When Slax Linux loads it goes in to the K Desktop Environment, which is a graphical user interface rather like Windows, and you can download and install familliar programs such as OpenOffice, Opera, Firefox, Thunderbird etc. This is great as it means you can take your essential e-mails, documents and web bookmarks with you wherever you go.
The only problem I had with Slax was getting it to recognise my wirless network, this was due to the fact that the inbuilt configuration tools only allowed a connection to a WEP network or worse, such as an unsecured network. As I use a WPA network Slax found the network, but would not allow me to connect. However once I worked out how to use the wpa_supplicant and wpa_gui tools from the command line it was not a problem to connect to my network. I hope that in future releases of Slax it is easier to connect to any wireless network, and I hope that someone writes a tool that will make it simple for any Linux distribution to go online with a wireless network.
All in all, if you want a fast operating system, then go for Slax Linux.