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It prides itself on being a distro that is well-suited to older PCs, and for the purposes of this review I tried Topaz on two PCs, one modern, the other more aged - and experienced blistering performance on both.

The first was an Acer Aspire Timeline 1810TZ laptop with a 1.3GHz Intel Pentium SU4100 dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, Intel WiFi Link 1000 and Gigabit Ethernet networking, and Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics (my new baby!).

The other machine was a desktop Acer Aspire M1640 with a 440 Celeron processor, 512MB of RAM, and an nVidia GeForce 7050 graphics card.

Unusually, the Elive developers strongly recommend that you install their ISO onto a USB memory stick rather than a CD, and to that end have created a specially-tailored version of Unetbootin, which is available here.

This approach certainly places Elive in the netbook arena, where so many machines do without optical drives.

Don't worry if you have no experience of using Unetbootin, because there is a good guide on the download page, and it works a treat. I installed Topaz onto a 4GB drive for this review.

Having tweaked the BIOS on my laptop to ensure it booted from the USB stick first, I launched into Elive and, after a few simple localisation/configuration questions, arrived at Elive's stunning, animated login screen.

To get an idea of how different this login screen is, check out this video. There's a bit of embellishment on the video - you don't get ALL the flashing lights and colours - but only a tiny bit. Elive really is snazzy.