My laptop has a Celeron 600MHz chip, 184M RAM
It is terribly slow, but works!
Well, I would have have made a 700MB /swap partition during install at the least to try and speed things up.
Wondering if you are running xfce,fluxbox,or icewm also. I would be running Fluxbox or Icewm Window Managers with those specs.
But hey! Glad at least it is working for you.