Help with optimising AntiX for an old VAIO laptop
I bought an old VAIO laptop a while ago that ran Windows and since it was running really slow, I thought the best course of action was to install a light linux distro so that the laptop could have a second life.
The laptop I'm talking about specifically is a VAIO PCG-4V1M. It runs a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 with 1Gb of DDR2 RAM.
I installed antiX 23.2 "Arditi del Popolo" and hoped for the best: a somewhat smooth experience with the very limited components and specs in hand which, hopefully, could run this light distro.
As you can imagine, if I'm writing here asking for help, it's because it didn't go according to plan. The laptop is as slow as it was on Windows 7. To load a single word document it can take between 30 to 75 seconds, depending on the size of the file. PDF files take even longer, from around 55 seconds to even 125 seconds in some instances. It's very rough, the battery lasts very little (which was another problem I was hoping to solve with replacing Windows with antiX), around 1h30min with only a word document and a pdf loaded, and the web browser just refuses to work.
Now, I'm not asking for these problems to magically go away, and I'm very aware of the limited capabilities (to say the least) the laptop has, but I did want to ask to people who actually know what they're doing to help me. My goal for this laptop is to use it mostly for writing essays, articles, etc. For this I need some basic things: a basic browser to search stuff like wikipedia, maybe old reddit, articles ..., a text editor like libre office writer, a pdf viewer a spelling corrector (for both spanish and english), a local dictionary (so that I don't have to go online if I don't need to), a light email (maybe like claws mail), a music and video player, a photo viewer, a calendar/notes/task app (I've looked up some and Osmo came up?), bluetooth and, of course, the terminal.
Is it possible to optimise antiX so that it can run those things without any problems? How can I optimise it if it's possible? What applications should I have for each thing I need? Do I need to change OS? If so, which one is even lighter?
Thank you in advance for the help!