Feisty Fawn on Sentia

I just bought a new laptop for my wife, so now my Alienware Sentia has trickled back down to me. The last time I reinstalled XP, I left a free partition for linux. Last night, I installed Feisty Fawn herd 5 on it. The performance is terrible! This is the original Sentia, Intel Pentium M 1.4 GHz Processor with a gig of RAM. Ubuntu should run great with these specs. While pondering this, I remember that I also had a hard time running a live distro on this machine (I think it was Damn Small). I guessing that there is some odd setting that needs to be changed in the BIOS.