Need Help in regards to choosing the right linux distro for my system.

[ak47basketball]

Hello,
I'm going to explain my situation to you.  I have a pretty old computer which runs windows xp service pack 2 with roughly a 35 gb hard drive, along with only 256 mb of ram.  Now I need to figure out which distro would work best.  I've taken many online "tests or quizzes" in which will help you choose the best distro and they all manly have openSuse or Fedora as the main ones and sometimes Linux mint.  Now this is all well and good but it is my assumption all of these either recommend or require more than 256 mb of ram.  I don't want to have a distro (unless recommended) that has a minimum of 256 mb because i don't want it to turn into something similar to xp in which is slow.  So can i get some suggestion along with some reasoning on which distro would be best.

Thank you so much for any help!
ak47basketball