Generally Hopeless

Berton said:

And not just kids, this summer I sent 4 Notebooks I had rehabbed with a missionary to Honduras for a school.

Great idea! I think there are still some good miles in many of these "senior" machines. Just takes a bit of work to reduce the load on cpu and memory.
Thanks for the idea.

Today I took the plunge and loaded Lubuntu onto a clean, formatted drive. The process was easy and didn't take long.

Once it was loaded, I did the basics like making a wireless internet connection (again, easy).
I opened the browser options and installed Firefox.
I wasn't sure how to install my network printer (drivers and such), but it actually proved fairly straight forward. After indicating I wanted to add a network printer, the installer searched out the drivers for me and installed them. Hearing the "test page" printing was a thrill.
The clock in the task bar defaults to 24 hour format. It took a good bit of internet searching to find the combination of codes to get a 12 hour format.
As for browsing, Firefox launches and loads Google on the home page in a bit over 8 seconds. Not bad at all.
Searches don't seem to process as fast as a modern 64 bit machine, but is still well within the acceptable range. I was surprised at how well it actually browsed.
Being a Windows dude since DOS and Windows 95, I have a lot of background that is not really applicable to a Linux setup. It's going to take a while to get used to it, but so far I'm not throwing things or F-bombs.
I think this can be a decent little laptop with acceptable performance (not gaming), but a good browsing laptop.
Good experience so far.

TomTT2 said:

Good experience so far.

So... not as 'generally hopeless' after all.

Pleased for you.

Sometimes I'm surprised at what can be accomplished with some study and research. The light weight Lubuntu distro seems to be the key to getting this low resource computer up and running decently.