Fast OS for very basic use?

I am in the market for a mobile note taker of sorts. I have some old laptops, one of wich being a toshiba wich is very thin, 16" screen 2GB of ram, IDE HD, centrino at 2.2Ghz. I have moved this laptops main board into a very thin case with no CD drive and just the LCD on it. I am debating on installing the LCD for the laptop in place of my trucks sun visor and keeping this in there. Here is what i want to do and i hope perhaps someone can tell me the best OS for it.

Take notes wich include phone numbers, dates and times, perhaps very long descriptions and txt fields to be grouped under these names/phone numbers. voice recording or at least to plug a hand held voice recorder into this system and save the audio logs. allow a document scanner to scan to PDF via USB and possibly but not required to run a program like dragon naturally speaking for dictation and transcription. i can do this on my desktop at home however if its to much to ask.

I manage some apartments and am trying to get more organized. I plan to use some sort of cloud system such as mobile me from apple so the 3 of us managers can access a single calender and upload/download documents we are working on.

I want the startup time on this system to be absoutly no more than 15 seconds. I have found some SSD drive for IDE comps but im trying to do this on the cheap.


thanks for your help.