Ya, Mandrake 9 is awesome. Checkout
www.distrowatch.com for all the popular distros. Linux has excellent hardware support. If you dont have anything really exotic you will be fine. My machine is 2 years old and I do not have any trouble with the new distros. There are several "small" distros available, Peanut, being my fave, is under 400 mb for the full install. Yoper is a new up and comer as well - the next version should be awesome.