This is on a HP Pavilion dv 1000 that I am having some coached success breathing new AntiX life into.

Yes, you can.

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Was the ticket. THANKS!

And it gave me an idea of installing a SSD instead of a faster HDD. And the other 'shoulder' asked:"Gilding the lilly?"

Speed test improved too. (?)

Best see if you have SATA connectors as your inxi -F showed you have 4200 rpm PATA.drive.

Yes. 4200 rpm PATA is it. Have a 7200 rpm PATA in the mail - and 2GB RAM. We'll see. The SWAP is still nagging at me. The Thumb still seems to work OK and it seems that a separate drive for SWAP would be desirable - especially if I could use something like a Thumb drive or SD card or RAM drive. Any Thoughts on that?

Well after all the updated parts, the swap may not even get hit.
But putting the swap file on something else, just so long as it is not on the same PATA ribbon, has always been faster.
That way the interrupts do not slow things down.

OK on 'Swap not getting hit' and on not having the SWAP on the same PATA ribbon. Since this is a thin notebook that leaves externals like thumb drives and SD cards and some other slots. I've heard that thumb drives and SSD's are best used if they are written infrequently and read often. Does this apply to SD cards as well?

Yes, it does. But check the specs on the SD cards as some have better read/write figures. But 10 MB seems a norm for my SD card reader built into my laptops.