The system chugged along well enough, until XP SP3 came out. I spent 3 non-contiguous day’s worth of troubleshooting and ultimately getting SP3 to install (one of the hang-ups was that Windows Genuine Advantage wouldn’t load, which was my fault, as I disabled as many services as I could to pep up performance) After the install, the system now crawled to a halt. Loading Chrome would bring the laptop to its knees — the VM process taking on up to 10 minutes, really. At this point I was ready to chuck the laptop.

I had heard over at the lottalinux podcast an incidental mention of installing puppy linux on an old laptop. A little quick research suggested it might make the machine usable again. So, with nothing to lose but time, I grabbed the latest ISO image of the bootable CD for Puppy Linux 4.1 (a 94 MB download; what’s not to love about that?) and burned the disk. I started the laptop with the disk and I had the new system up and running of the disk. As Chef Tell used to say; “Very simple, very easy.”

A little advice: when the Puppy installer says to override the grubconfig’s default for loading grub to the linux partition and to do so to the MBR, do what it says; choose “MBR.” Also, for grub, use the standard non-graphical loader for an old machine. Otherwise, the system chokes at startup, for whatever reason.

Now to get vncserver working on it…