Now this is more like it.

Having given up on Mint or Ubuntu on the Fujitsu, I thought I'd give Mint 9 RC a whirl on my Toshiba A120.

It's the most basic of the A120s, I believe, with a 1.4ghz single-core CPU (probably reasonably state of the art when the machine was made), and 1.3GB of RAM available.

And Mint 9 positively flies on it. It was a simple matter to use the built in Mint start-up disc creator to set up a persistent install on a 4gb flash drive. Interestingly, it seems to boot up much faster than the Ubuntu 10.04 persistent install, and there's no need to choose "Try out..." every time.

I had a look at the system monitor a few minutes ago. With Firefox (just one tab), Writer and Calc open, and RhythmBox happily playing Absolute Classic Rock, RAM use was about 380MiB (no swap available.) The CPU was coping fine, too - fluctuating around 40%, albeit with the odd spike to 100%. All pretty efficient.

So I'm greatly looking forward to the final release of Mint 9. If they'd only find a way to make it play nicely with the Fujitsu... I suspect people with up-to-date computers don't have half these hassles. The joys of buying elderly computers on eBay - lots of fun, though.