* OpenOffice Writer and Impress: I draw diagrams on Impress slides so I
can have them on a projector and then paste-special into Writer to
produce worksheets.
* Seamonkey Web browser, mail and composer working in a single thread: I
could pay my ISP shell account bill using PayPal fine.
* Using rsync from uxterm to copy work to an external USB hard drive and
to online storage
* Compiling mtPaint
Things that didn't work
* Online banking site won't work in Seamonkey - just blank page with
browser in some kind of initialisation loop
* Firefox: attempt to use online banking site results in oom_reaper
closing the browser
* I had to hop on my X201 (4Gb i5) to use Firefox so can't live only on
the T42 and use online banking. I could just go to the bank of course!
Responsiveness
* OpenOffice Impress, Writer, Thunar and UXTerm open in Workspace 1 and
Seamonkey Web browser in Workspace 2. Switching between workspaces
takes about a quarter of a second for the screen to redraw and when
switching back to Seamonkey it takes about 10 seconds for menus to
become responsive sometimes not always. I'm guessing paging stuff out
of swap. Only 150Mb of swap in use maximum.
* OpenOffice Impress: drawing diagrams at high zooms (30x) to line up
certain objects accurately: screen display can be slow to update
(sometimes you can see the 'tiles' updating one after the other) but
small movements are smooth so workable when dragging an object. Large
movements are jerky so you need to zoom out a bit, change location,
then zoom in again. I can work with this.
Reflection
Some of the other participants are using P3/256Mb based laptops, even one
with 128Mb. These participants tend to be using command line applications
(e.g mutt for email).
One participant is using an operating system contemporary with their
laptop which is a nice idea. That would give me Windows 2000 or Slackware
10.2 to 11 for this laptop (2004 to 2006 model availability). I know that
Windows 2000 and Office 2000 would work very quickly on this machine. I
used Windows 2000 at work in early 2000s and it was fine on a P120
(Pentium 3 I think) with 256Mb of RAM. Slackware 10.2 looks like a bit of
a challenge to get working - I'd have to modify a testing 2.6 series
kernel and manually install kernel modules for the WiFi. KDE 3.5 and Xfce
version 4.6 should fly though.
