Let's run Win10 on really really old hardware

I guess upgrading ram to 2GB would be a good idea. My fiancee has got a very similar one, but with 2GB.

Windows Setup has the bad habit of messing with your working drivers. If any newer driver is found in Microsoft servers, it will download and install it no matter if your current driver is excellent. This initially makes the system slower than Windows 7 because the generic driver usually doesn't have the same performance as the official OEM driver. But, if you take the time to download and install latest Windows 7 64-bit or 8 64-bit drivers for your system (assuming there are no Windows 10 drivers), then you can restore functionality and performance. Usually the performance is equal to Windows 7 64-bit with latest OEM drivers installed, sometimes even better. I have a Vista era laptop which was running Windows 10 32-bit (for compatibility with very old games). I replaced the disk and tried to install Windows 11 (64-bit) bypassing compatibility checks. Now it is faster with Windows 11 than it was with 10 32-bit. Yes, Windows 10 32-bit limited available RAM to 2.93GB while Windows 11 can use up to 3.5GB of the 4GB RAM, but that kind of performance improvement must be due to drivers as well and possibly better resource management, not only RAM. Just try and see. If you have 3GB RAM or less go for Windows 10 32-bit, you won't see any difference running 64-bit and it might also be slower. If you have 4GB go for Windows 10 64-bit, provided there are Windows Vista 64-bit or newer drivers. If it is too old that only has 32-bit drivers, I recommend to stick with 32-bit.

PS: Just saw your specs in your post. Yes, there are 64-bit drivers for that hardware. If there are not available from manufacturer support site, go to each individual manufacturer (Intel, Realtek etc) to download them. However, with just 1GB RAM it will be slow even with Windows 10 32-bit. To make it a little faster disable any visual effects such as transparency, animations, fades. The fewer the better. I only leave some shadow at the text to make it more readable and at the mouse cursor. You could also try a smaller display resolution, such as 1280x800 instead of 1440x900 and replacing the wallpaper with a solid color.

I don't know about the artificial date, but I think it also compares driver versions. If your working graphics driver has earlier version than the one in Windows Update, then it gets replaced. The solution is to block the driver update with Windows Update Show/Hide Tool or similar utility. Unless a newer driver version is released (unlikely for old hardware), your original driver won't be replaced again ever. Been there, done that.

PS: After a major update, such as from 21H2 to 22H2, your driver might be replaced again. Just block it again and forget about it.

In that case it's not the date but the hardware IDs. There are cases that Windows Update THINKS a generic driver is more suitable than your current OEM driver based on the hardware IDs. It replaces it and you lose features (such as Graphics Control Panel). The previous driver worked fine, even if the hardware IDs do not match 100%. This can be the case when an advanced user has forced a desktop AMD graphics driver on a laptop since no suitable mobile driver was available. I have done it many times. Windows Update sees that your driver doesn't match and replaces it. In any case if you want to be 100% sure that Windows Update won't try to replace your working driver, just block any relevant update (such as Intel display update etc). If you are sure you have updated all your drivers and you don't want these replaced it is not a bad idea to block ALL driver updates. I have installed Windows 10/11 on many systems and I frequently see some driver updates in Windows Update list. I immediately block them. There is a chance that they improve something but there is a bigger chance that they harm something else. I would rather manually download any newer drivers from Manufacturer.

PS: I know that Windows Update doesn't offer only Microsoft drivers but also some OEM drivers. But almost always these are only the basic driver without any extras such as Intel Graphics Properties or Catalyst Control Panel. I want to have the full pack so I disable the update and manually download the full driver from OEM support site. nVidia users can verify that: Windows Update has installed an OLDER version of the graphics drivers without all the components. If you go at nVidia's site you find a newer driver available and if you do a custom installation and check the versions before installing you will see that a couple of components have no currently installed version. I want the full pack and the latest, so I block any nVidia updates and manually download latest version from nVidia.