Windows 7 Enterprise will run on that hardware, especially with its 2G ram. I've used it on Pentium M 1.3 laptops with 1G and 1.5 G ram.
On linux, you'll hear a lot about Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. Originally it was distinguished by including all the media players and codecs rather than needing to install them separately. When Ubuntu developed the Unity desktop (think Win 8), many switched to Mint, which stuck with a conventional desktop. Currently for older hardware your best choices for Mint would be Mate, which uses a development of the older Gnome 2 desktop, or XFCE, known as a lightweight desktop. And I second the suggestion to download live cd versions and stick them on a usb flash drive. Playing around a little that way should tell you which you like best. The most likely areas for difficulty would be video display drivers and wireless drivers. Both are solvable for an install but might cause issues on a live disk. Some years ago I found Intel chipsets a slam dunk for live disks because of the lack of driver issues.
Another vote for Distrowatch for info, reviews and links.
And a mention again of Rufus for making bootable flash drives. When I last used it circa version 1.3.3, some versions had issues with some Win or linux distros. He's now up to ver 1.4.6 I see. When it works it's very quick and very easy.
Most linux distros can now read NTFS files.
Let us know how this works out for you.
