It is well known that Linux is much less resource intensive than Windows. I have a good lesson in this because I run the latest Ubuntu on three of my four Fit PC 1s. (The other runs Gentoo, but that's another story.)
I got a better lesson in this recently. I use several GPS applications on Linux as navigation tools, including routing. On my way to visit friends (an 8 hour trip) I had the laptop set up as usual with GPS and GPSware. As I pulled into the town where my hosts reside, my laptop failed catastrophically. It would not even reboot. This at 10:30 at night.
Fortunately, I was able to remember the street address and how to get to a home I had never been to, and didn't have to call my hosts to ask for help.
This computer normally has a 1 GB SODIMM add-on Field Replaceable Unit (FRU, in IBMese) and the 256 MB SODIMM that came with it. A bit of work with memtest86+ (on most Ubuntu installations and on Finnix CD-ROMS; see the boot menu) and a Phillips screwdriver showed that the 1 GB SODIMM had died, and the 256 MB SODIMM was still intact. So I had a working 256 MB (240 MB after you subtract the video memory) laptop. Some testing with badblocks on Finnix showed that I had a good hard drive. Phew!
So I am now up and running and navigating through the American Southwest on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on 240 MB. It's slow, and the hard drive is busy, but it works. This is a Good Thing because right now I am off-grid and a 1.5 hour drive to the nearest city even likely to have a replacement SODIMM. Since this is a four year old laptop, Office Depot and the like don't carry what I need.
And I have found an unexpected advantage to nanoblogger as well: being off-grid right now, my Internet access is via satellite. This makes interactive web work slow and tedious. If I were using typical blogware, I would not try to add this entry. But I can post to my nb blog locally, and then commit to the local git repo. (I'll push to the git server when I get home.) When I am satisfied with the entry, I can upload to the servers over the satellite link. As that is a "fire and forget" operation, the slow reaction time of the satellite link is not a hindrance.