I have a Fujitsu P2110 with the Transmeta Crusoe CPU. It was passed along by a friend who had upgraded to a more powerful machine but didn't want it to go into the trash. She said it was "slow slow SLOW".

Well, yes. The machine had 256MB RAM, and the Crusoe grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP SP2. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. It took 8 minutes to boot, and longer to do anything once up. It did a good job of emulating classic mainframe "death by thrashing" You could get a daughter card to add 128MB RAM, but that wouldn't help in this case. (There was another daughter card for an earlier Fujitsu model that added 256MB, but I couldn't find confirmation it worked in the P2110.)

I treated it as an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of low end hardware without throwing money at it. I swapped in a drive from a failed laptop, repartioned and reformatted, and set it to multi-boot. Win2K Pro SP4 actually ran, more or less, on the P2110, especially after I took everything out of startup that could be removed. I also installed two flavors of Linux - Ubuntu and Puppy, and FreeDOS.

Puppy was designed for low end hardware, and Puppy itself worked well enough. Applications didn't. The speed bump was apparently the IDE4 HD. IDE4 was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn't assist.

Installing Ubuntu was a challenge. Xubuntu downloaded and installed, but performance was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended what I did - DL the Minimal CD and install from it. That would give me a working bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to pick and choose what else got added. Lubuntu got the nod as desktop GUI, and worked, though it was noting I'd call speedy.

Puppy and Ubuntu were both installed on ext4 file systems, and mounted each other's slices when they booted. I spent some time arranging things so there was one copy of large apps shared between them.

FreeDOS flew. The challenge with it was to get it to boot from grub2. I did, but have no idea which of the fiddles I tried actually made it work.

Ubuntu provided another quirk. A new Ubuntu release came out. This one required PXE. The P2110 didn't have it. Installation proceeded normally, but things went to hell in a bucket when I reboted after install. Lack of PXE made installation of the new kernel fail, and that caused a cascade failure. I had to wipe the Ubuntu FS slice and redo from scratch, carefully stopping at the last release that worked and staying put. A test in the installer to insure that PXE was present before continuing and refusing to upgrade if not would have been nice. I assumed the Ubuntu folks just never imagined someone would try to install on a machine that lacked it.

I got surprise email from a woman in Hong Kong who also had a P2110. She got the 256MB RAM expansion card, it worked, and she was running WinXP with acceptable performance. I tipped my hat in respect, but had retired the P2110. I was an experiment, the experiment was completed, and actual work got done elsewhere.

I still have the machine, but haven't booted it in ages.