first and foremost what you need to do is cut down on runlevel services, this is equivalent to your running processes in windows, there is a good how to by broch in the how to section, which ones to turn off.
you go to yast, runlevel services, then edit each one as necessary, this will free up ram. also you need to edit to dump temp files on each startup, this is to save space on your harddisk and it will save you headaches later on when having difficulty booting inot the system, we will talk about how to do this later once you find the windows .exe for your wireless driver....once you find that, post and we will go from there. inside the executable is the file needed by ndiswrapper to get you a blue light on your wireless.


edit: Im sorry, you are using a dongle...I thought internal wifi...you have the driver...the easiest way to get the file needed if you still have a win machine around is to install it go to directory and get the file needed....
this howto may be of some help....
check here

also this thread at pluscom may be very helpful as well da link

which suse version are you using?

remember the other two suggestions are also vital, we will talk once we take care of the dongle....

keep eye candy to a bare minimum, and also with such a small harddrive forget about downloading large files unless you have an external hdd....can always get a bigger hdd.

also welcome to linux....the number one antivirus, malware, spyware around!! and talk about security! in a recent hacking contest mac went right away then vista...as of this writing Linux is the only one left standing..you can't compare the security it gives you. DO NOT BECOME INTIMIDATED!!! once you learn to stop thinking the windows way, you will realize exactly what you have been missing out on. good luck!! It is not as nearly as difficult as it sounds and once certain concepts are learned it will be a breeze...once we get your wireless up and running your next task will be doing an update.. The first time I came to linux I had to make a winmodem....an internal software based modem, work with linux.....now that was a crash course into linux which was about as heavy as things could get for a noob coming off of windows 98. I got the modem up and running....