Recently, I got the chance to "revive" my old laptop: an Acer Aspire 1300, with AMD AthlonXP 1.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM and 20 GB hard disk. This machine is so deprecated, compared to today's mini netbooks, that searching the net for "Acer Aspire 1300" returns almost entirely shops for battery replacements. Until now, it used to "struggle" under Windows XP Home, but I decided it was time to try something more efficient and lightweight. And here it is, as good as new, with openSuSE 11.1 (32-bit of course), full installation plus Matlab and some other tools:

It seems that Linux is still the best way to revive old PC machines, discover more free space in the hard disk and get the most out of legacy hardware.

Further info: opensuse.org, distrowatch.com, linux.org