New OS for my old Acer Travelmate C112's

[aewhistory]

Okay, I have two old Acer Travelmate C112 tablet/laptops from years ago that I love using. They are VERY light (about 2 lbs), and perfect for showing notes to my classes and so on. Also, because they are basically worthless, I really don't need to worry about anyone stealing them or them getting damaged since it wouldn't be any sort of financial loss if I were to lose them.

All of this said, I'm about to reinstall the OS and I'd like to update it. This is an old PIIIm running at 1.2 MHz (and 1.5gb of RAM), so I don't know if I have any options beyond the tablet version of Windows that came with it. I've heard that Windows 7 is much less resource heavy than previous versions, but even so I am pretty sure it won't run on a machine this old, right? What about a Linux distribution? I know I could try something like Puppy Linux, but I am almost sure I would lose the tablet functionality. Not to mention that this is an even more limited OS than I need for this machine. I need something not resource intensive, but it runs Windows reasonably well for my liking.

So do I just reinstall the old OS or is there anything new I can use to bring my machine a bit into the present?

As an aside, any suggestion on what is the most recent version of MS Office (or MSOffice compatible suite) would be best to run? I've used 2003 without running into any resources hitches. Think I can get away with a newer version?

Thanks for any help. I have a lot of computers to rebuild in the next few weeks and I'm hoping to cut to the chase as much as possible with this.

Thanks in advance, Aaron

 

[joshyboy82]

I knew that the Chromebooks had some seriously weak hardware, so I went fishing for an OS download to post here, but I found some more interesting ones, that I might even try on my 2006 Toshiba. I am unsure if any of these support Touch, you may need to google them individually to find out. (my Toshiba isn't touch, so it is personally of no interest).

http/www.howtogeek.com/217659/how-to-get-a-chrome-os-like-operating-system-on-any-pc/

Edit: The ChromixiumOS requires a 1Ghz Processor and 512Mb RAM

 

[aewhistory]

Thank you very much! I didn't even think about something like the Chromebooks as an analogy for helping to find a useable OS, so I was totally lost. This is really helpful. I'll go thru this and post some feedback this weekend.