Now, I have a P-4 Notebook and a P-4 desktop machine for work. That P-4 desktop is my main system for Microsoft Office, some casual data analysis and web surfing only. It takes virtually forever when I switched on SPSS, Words and Firefox. I also find that Windows version of Firefox is prone to memory leak.
I slaughtered the Windows 2000 in that P-4 1.6GHz notebook with 256 M ram. I installed Xubuntu Linux in it. It got Abi-word for report writing, Gnumeric preloaded for data-entry. (I usually use tab-delimited format, I always keep data interoperability. I hate binary data files such as Excel or SPSS) I then do the statistical analysis by R. This machine is very crispy right now.
I have no time to take the repaired eMac from case.