A couple of weeks ago I brought my Dell Mini 1012 back into service by wiping the install of Windows 7 Ultimate and putting XP Service Pack 3 on instead. Amazingly, Dell not only still had the drivers on their site, but they still had drivers for this model FOR XP. An OS this model never officially shipped with to my knowledge.
Dropping the OS a couple of tiers not only improves its compatibility with software it can actually run, but also gained it 20 more frames per second on Quake.