Day 1: 10th July

   Things that worked:

     * 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.