Hi @HelenPixels and Welcome to “It’s Foss”.
Of all the suggestions I read, I like these the best.
1 - junk the items / give them to a museum or Goodwill
2 - Upgrade RAM. It is the easiest, less costly, and best boost for a PC. Install 2 GB Ram for each PC.
3 - Install a Linux like Puppy.
4 - Install a SSD disk. This can be difficult on some laptops, easy on others.
Here is some info I found.
I tried slax - it seems to be bare-bones and we need something amateur recyclers and ordinary impecunious users can get started with straight away.
The present difficulty with renovating and redistributing old computers for those in need is the demise of 32-bit Ubuntu, particularly Mint; we didn’t want to change as it’s familiar to the team.
Debian is maintaining 32 bits, and Mint have Linux Mint Debian Edition in reserve. Emmabuntus DE is also interesting in this field. The trouble is with the 1Gb RAM, because for Debian you need at least 1Gb unshared and available. RAM can be salvage from scrapped machines, but some relatively recent W7 Starter machines are unusable because their RAM is soldered in (I understand that MS made that a condition for a cheap or absent W7 licence) .
The only other 32bit Linux I know of that could be used on those machines would be Gentoo.
My Lord, the compile time would astronomical!!!
MX Linux would be a great option though
The best OS for the old laptops is already installed, it is just outdated, anything else
will be a downgrade.
About a year ago I run into Xebian. Based on Debian unstable, a community release with Xfce. Boy, that thing is fast! Probably the fastest distro I’ve ever tried on a USB stick, live. However, not for beginners, because there is no documentation, they offer no help on their web. But for those, who like Debian, Xfce, and like to play with Linux, it’s a must to try! I would probably use it instead of Xubuntu.
BTW, they offer 32 or 64 bit ISO download.
https://xebian.org/download/
Although the reviews are a bit old Distros usually improve over time
Tiny Core Linux can be downloaded as a 32-bit or 64-bit x86 build
Where to get
I just saw that it (TinyCore) can run on a Pi Zero W…
I barely use my Pi Zero 2 W (it’s basically a quad core version of the Zero, but 64 bit capable - i.e. arm64) - and was considering plonking a low load DE on it - on the list was GNUStep, and now I see Tiny Core with FLWM… First questions - anyone know if it’s possible in FLWM to move the window controls (e.g. _ X) from the right to the left (e.g. X _ ). It’s not a show stopper, but I like consistency and as I also use two Macs - I hate it when I have to move the mouse so much father to the right 
…
So - I’m thinking about trying a low power low load DE on these specs :
Hmmm - or maybe not even? I might actually leave it running Raspbian (32 bit armhf) and install a DE on top - as I already spent a fair bit of time configuring it as a “gadget” (USB serial, ethernet, storage)…
There’s too much to list about how much I didn’t like it and it didn’t meet my needs… I also would STRONGLY advise - TO NOT RUN MX on a Windows XP era laptop!
No-one has mentioned the approach of starting with a minimal ( ie net install) iso for whatever distro you favour, and building your own mini distro by just installing the apps you need, choosing a light DE or just WM, and culling any excess.
It is not a ‘drop-in’ solution, but a custom build would give the best possible result.
It would not matter which distro… they all use the same kernels.
I already did that. Not yesterday though…
I ran FreeBSD on a 486DX2 with 128Mb of ram .
It ran X11 and twm window manager , but no DE. Ran netscape browser.
I used that machine (actualy 2 of them) from the mid 1990’s to about 2012.
Took about 3 minutes to boot. It was FreeBSD2.x
So I think you can meet the challenge of revitalising that old machine. You may need to dig up old distro versions to get hardware support. Most of todays distros have dropped support for very old hardware.
Might dig my old 32bit Acer desktop out and see if it will still compile Gentoo. It
originally ran Windows Vista Basic. Give me something to do on this rainy day!!!
I wonder how accurately we could mimic the old laptops by using a VM?
Then we could do some “what ifs” and see about how it looks.
AKA : “emulate a slug”?
Probably can be done in QEMU… But I’ve never seen any option in VMware Workstation / Player, Oracle Virtual Box or others (like KVM, or Gnome Boxes etc) to turn a recent powerful beast apex predator into a mangy 3 legged dog via emulation…
I don’t know how to use QEMU as such. But I do use it via UTM on my MacBooks… It can emulate nearly anything out there on my Apple Silicon system (M1) - e.g. the UTM Galllery website has a pre-rolled instance of Solaris 9 with CDE emulating a Sparc (low end sparc mind you).
Who remembers the old “turbo” button, in case your AT machine was too fast for some software or game, you could turn Turbo off…
Use the smallest profile you can find.
Gentoo is always like a minimal install, but you want to really shrink it.
I use mostly VirtualBox. With that you can allocate CPU “cores”, RAM, and disk to the VM. Doing that we could hamstring the VM to 1 CPU (maybe 2), 1 GB RAM, and 80 GB disk. That way the virtual hardware would be similar to the virtual hardware.
I get that - but you can’t really compare even a single core modern CPU running at over 2 Ghz, to a cruddy Pentium II or III under 1000 Ghz with a tiny CPU cache (and probably only one)… You need to hamstring the single core you allocate for a true comparison… There’s probably a way to do that I guess? Maybe find the PID and renice it to something VERY low priority…
I’ve just rebooted my Pi Zero 2 W and ran startx with a tiny 720p HDMI monitor using GNUStep - looks really nice and retro, retro in a good way like X Motif or CDE, not retro in a bad way like Windows XP (I ALWAYS downtuned it to look exactly like Windows 2000 - bugger the silly bling)…
Maybe a 32 bit distro (without PAE) and something light like GNUstep?
Heck - this tiny credit card sized* computer with a quad core RISC CPU would wipe the floor with a Windows XP era computer… GNUstep on 512 MB of RAM with 4 armhf (arm64 capable) cores is eminently usable (uname says it’s actually arm7l)…
* still annoys crap out of me when other SBCs are called “Credit Card Sized” - bullshit, the Pi, Pi2 P3 and 4 ARE NOT CREDIT CARD SIZED! However, the Pi Zero, Zero W and Zero 2 W are!
My 486 dx2 66Mhz with 128Mb ram had a Turbo button. It never seemed to do anything.
Ram is not the biggest problem. That machine would run BSD. Biggest problem is , as you say, cpu speed. 66Mhz is just slow… 3mins to boot, 1min to bring up netscape, 2 hours to write a backup CD, … I thought it was wonderful compared to old mainframes.
Never had a 486 with more than 20 MB RAM (way back when)
When I first started using Linux - it was on a spare 386DX with 8 MB RAM…
I think my first ever machine with 128 MB RAM was a Pentium II 266… I did dual boot that, with Slackware and Windows NT 4… Oh that’s right - that motherboard had dual CPU sockets… I eventually boosted it up to 2 x 466 Mhz Celerons and 1536 RAM over about 2-3 years - I think I’ve still go that mobo in a crate somewhere…
I’ve now got a couple of 486’s with 64 MB of RAM in them, one’s an Intel Panther EL486 - was classed as a “workstation” in it’s heyday, intended for either Windows NT or SCO Unix - sort of pizza box size - I used to run a Linux router / firewall on it - can’t remember the name - you used a website to make your floppy to boot it - and that’s it (as well as a web interface to monitor and change stuff later)… 4 x 16 MB 72 pin SIMMs… Back then I think I ran the Firewall / Router software on 16 MB RAM…
And another strange 486 beast that has 8 x 30 pin SIM slots, but with a daughterboard (part ISA, part proprietary) to add a further 8 30 pin SIMs, for a total of 64 MB (and I have 16 4MB 30 pin SIMMs for it).
Both of which I intend someday, purely for shits’n’giggles, to get running DSL (Damn Small Linux)… Probably after I retire, which is still a few years away now…
But I’d never contemplate trying to do any “serious” stuff, like web browsing, on a Windows XP era machine…
Just today - I’ve tried (on Pi Zero 2W) :
GNUStep
FLWM
AfterStep
I really want something snappy, lite, usable but still a bit old school looking - so far AfterStep seems the best :
But ideally I’d like something in monochrome (256 shades of grey) that looks a bit like the early Sun XWindow system (before CDE)…
OLWM was what I was looking for Open Look Window Manager - a thing of great simplicity and beauty :
