Old Puppy, older laptop

I decided to give Puppy Linux another tryout on the $15 Laptop (the 1999 vintage Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 64 MB of RAM and 3 GB hard drive). I also wanted to go back in time with Puppy, so I pulled a disc of the first version of Puppy I ever ran -- 2.13, which came out early last year, I believe. New versions of Puppy tend to come out every two or three months (the current version is 3.01, which I've burned but never booted, since I never found anything wrong with 3.00).

I haven't bothered with sound yet, but I did get the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card working, and I even got a WiFi signal -- it's been spotty here of late.

I'm even able to write this entry in Movable Type 4. The screen takes a second or so to catch up with my typing (I'll have to try with Damn Small Linux/Firefox 1.0.5 and Debian Etch/Iceweasel 2.0.0.11). I'll also have to try Google Docs with Puppy's Seamonkey Web browser. I thought that Puppy or DSL might improve video performance, but I think this old laptop is what it is.

One thing I can tell you is that it's much easier to run an old PC like this with a distribution geared to older hardware than it is with a general-purpose distro (even Debian). Everything from booting to hardware configuration goes better for me with Puppy and DSL on this Compaq laptop.

I seem to remember the version of Firefox in DSL not being able to run Google Docs, and as I said before, screen response on Google Docs with Iceweasel in Debian Etch was less than Ideal. The laptop performs much, much better with "regular" apps like text editors, word processors and the like.

I need to do more tests, but I'm leaning toward running this laptop exclusively with Puppy or DSL. I'd consider keeping Debian Etch, but I can't seem to get sound working. I'll have to see how good the sound is in Puppy and DSL before I make any final pronouncements on the matter.