Turning my windows laptop in to a linux laptop

[Farhan]

Hi all, I have a couple of issues, and these are my options.
Back in February, I found a dell inspiron 2500 for about $450 on overstock.com.
When i got the thing, it had came with Windows xp home, I thought ok, fine what ever so i installed a screenreader on it, first problem.
The dcm was all screwed up and i had no way of fixing this, well after that i almost got a refund on it sinse i had no way of fixing it and I tried everything.
I finally reformatted and got a propper coppy of windows on it, and yeh, dcm is still screwed, so today, i was messing with grml on it, and it seemed to work.
Can someone please help me out here and help me turn this laptop in to a linux machine, this dcm thing is really geting to me, and i want to find something a little bit more useable.
The specs on this laptop are.
pentium III 800 mhz with 256 mb of ram and a 20 gig harddrive.
I have no external synth sinse the one I had well sort of got killed by a freakly high windstorm.
Is there anyway i could install grml to the harddrive, still using the swspeak kernel, and use speechd-up on boot up to get speakup to speak from there?
Sorry for all the stupid questions. 
Farhan.