Oh ya? Hmmm, so much of the Linux community acts like Microsoft and Apple when it comes to resources too hugh? We got em' why not waste em'? 
Anymore, yes :/ KDE 4.x, Unity, and Gnome 3.x are monuments to this thinking. While Nicholas says he has KDE 4 running on 11 year old hardware just fine, I would not assume that to hold without loss of generality. The simple truth is you will sacrifice some speed for eye candy, and sacrifice some ease (as in "push button change config") of configuration with faster, lighter weight solutions. The integrated distros (crunchbang, linux mint LXDE edition, Lubuntu? So many) that use LXDE, or E17, or Openbox +
will run much faster on older hardware, period.
Having SAID that... As commodore john has pointed out, Linux can..er..suck. It is still not windows - and coming from a windows background can be obtuse and confusing as to how they do things. I have never set up a linux that is completely GUI driven for all setup yet. They may be out there - I just don't know of them.
BUT, if you don't mind some googling and a bit of tinkering at first (I mean, c'mon! We are Amiga people in 2013! We are no strangers to obtuse breakages and googling) you can end up with a very stable system.
O.K. you got my attention. Windows is pissing me off again too.
Any of those distros you mentioned make it easy to find out what drivers you need and get them without having to be a Linux guru?
Man I wish AROS fully supported this, I could just drag and drop the required drivers to where I need them. :/
Like Nicholas said, mostly all drivers should automagically be found by the kernel during install. From you laptop's era, the couple of things that probably won't be found are wireless card drivers (lots of closed hardware blobs not linuxable right out of the box) and wintel modems. Everything else should be fine, if at least functional. These days, even Nvidia drivers are installed (via the Nouveau driver set). Your laptop has an Intel set if I remember right, so it should have no problems on the display side. I've never run into an install in the last 14 years that wouldn't display.
