My brother doesn't use his laptop that much, mostly because it's old and slow and riddled with viruses. He has an old Toshiba Satellite A50, which has a capable 1.6GHz Pentium M processor and a crippling 256MB RAM. It has a disgusting keyboard and trackpad, and the screen only does 1024 x 768. 

I asked him what he used it for, when he does use it, and it's the typical low-tech requirement of "web and email." And I think his email provider is Hotmail anyway, so it's really "web and web."

Last night I backed up the small amount if data that he wanted to keep (all of his digital photos are on an external drive) and installed Ubuntu 8.04 for him. Unfortunately the installer required 256MB minimum, and when push comes to shove he only has 240MB because the video card steals 16MB. This doesn't cause the installer to bail though because, as far as it can tell, the machine is up to the task.

To help the installer out I switched to the console (ALT-F2) and created and mounted a swap partition. This helped the installer dramatically and meant that it could actually get the job done. I also found in the BIOS that CPU-frequency scaling was enabled, but the installer didn't know how to handle it properly so the machine was locked to 600MHz. I disabled it in the BIOS and it screamed along at its top-speed.

I rummaged around our "bits box" at work and found my old IBM ThinkPad. I popped the back panel off and pulled out two 256MB memory modules. Andrew's machine had room for one more so that got jammed in and now the laptop is much more responsive.

Turning off the Compiz fancy-pants visual stuff made a big change too, making the machine usable, but the extra RAM made it actually pleasurable.

The wireless and sound worked out of the box - it just took me a few minutes to find the external volume control knob.

The combination of more memory (more than double when you consider it's gone from 240MB to 496MB), a pedal-to-the-metal CPU frequency and a decent operating system has meant this old girl has a few more months (years?) of service in her yet... after which I'll definitely be recommending a Mac ;)