I'd suggest 8.04 xubuntu on that machine.
I have a DELL laptop (Latitude D600)
and it has very similar specs to your Compaq.

I have been running xubuntu for more than a full
year now, after trying others such as
Fedora and Open Suse. Xubuntu just responds better,
so I kept it. It's a good distro that will
allow you to install and use apps for both
GNOME and/or KDE - but for the meantime,
it's a solid, recent, lighter-weight linux that
should have you up and running in little time.

Try it out first with the Live CD. Laptops are notorious problems for Linux
because of the amount of proprietary parts they include. It is likely it will
work, but you need to put it through its paces before you install. You have the
right specs. It is just a question of how it is setup. Possible problems are
video, sound and networking which were probably configured to work with Windows
and optimized for that purpose.

I tried the Ubuntu on
my laptop and it didn't work, but I did get Puppy
Linux to work.
Now I my trying to download Ubuntu using Wubi, and
right now I am not a happy camper. 600+ megs to
download and for the last 8hrs I have downloaded a
total of 15 megs. I guess my cable modem is not fast
enough. Anyway it is telling me about 50hrs to
download the whole thing. Well I am not staying at the
comptuer to watch it as I do have a life other then
computers.

cable modem and that slow. MMM you may of wanted to use a bit torrent to
DL. Took about an hour. Or the mirror server is just really busy.

Since it's Wubi that he is downloading, he's likely restricted to
servers that likely don't have a good upload rate.

Getting standard .iso files is often the quickest with well-seeded
torrents, instead of servers or mirrors.
http://linuxtracker.org/

BTW, Puppy 4.0 looks like a nice release.