I guess Im lucky, I have a AMD64 T6420 Emachine with 2 gig ram and am using a 10gig IDE HD for testing Linux. I have tried Debian 3.01 and it is just too out of date, it would not mount my USB stick, I tried fixing it but managed to break it with a download and install of Hotplug ver 2 guess it didn't like that.
I downloaded Knoppix 5.1.1 CD-2007-01-04 and ran the "knoppix-installer" answered the questions
as best I could and it installed without complaints. I see my USB stick but cannot mount it perhaps that is because I used it with the LiveCD as a home for a persistant storage, will have to try using the LiveCD with it to see what happens. I would like to give that Debian Etch a shot, I would like to see how it compares with all the other flavors of Debian that I have tried.