Knoppix Booting
I think I found your problem :P(Just kidding, although I can't say I had great luck with Knoppix either. We must be unlucky).
If you are aiming at a lower-end machine, you might be interested in a distro using XFCE as its desktop environment. For example, Xubuntu is nice and lightweight.
I find that the live cd distros tend to be pickier in terms of hardware they cope with, so you may find better driver support out of the box with one of the *buntus, Fedora or OpenSuse.