For the record: memory is not the main cause of it taking about 20 minutes, albeit swapping never helps. The CPU of a.o. the IBM ThinkPad 20-series and the 600X is.
I disagree. The CPU (a P3) is remarkably fast, when it doesn't have to swap. The disk is not very fast, and swapping brings it to it's knees, for every program that needs to use swapping. Since Firefox (current versions), need so much memory, it needs to swap about 80% of what is in memory, just to display the default home page. Current versions are also not designed to swap efficiently, so it is constantly swapping (usually referred to as "thrashing"). I am using eCS 2.2b2 on it, and performance (when swapping is not needed) is actually quite good. I am pretty sure that it would work much better, if I could put enough memory into it (like 1 GB), but it is maxed out at 256 meg.
Firefox seems to work okay in a VBox system, with 800 meg of memory allocated, on modern computers, but I don't use it much in that configuration. Swapping is also a LOT faster, if needed.
If it took 20 minutes, then nowadays that's normal with an IBM ThinkPad A22e and other 20-series ThinkPads.
I agree with that statement. Firefox has been slowing down ever since it needed to start swapping (around version 4.0). My point was, that VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072 works fine with it, and Firefox will eventually get around to displaying a small web page (like HOBBES incoming), if you leave it alone.
The machine is still useable, for certain applications that I need, like HOUSE/2. It also has a real serial port, which is used with that program. More recent laptops rarely, if ever, have that feature.
I would also note, that the machine will sleep, and wake up, which very few modern machines will do with eCS.