Advice needed to speed up very slow machine

[Don Jackson <don1103@azark.com>]

I am seeking the advice of some of you who may have been down this path 
before.  Situation: I am working on an older 166 MHz Pentium-S machine with 
96 MB RAM, two 2.5GB hard drives, for a neighbor (rather poor) here in the 
Arkansas Ozarks.  She will be using it mainly for Email, web surfing, and 
possibly a few games.  She is somewhat used to Win98 and Outlook Express, but 
since I keep getting phone calls from her every time W hiccups, I decided to 
rebuild this older computer for her and put Debian GNU/Linux Sarge on it, 
figuring it might be less work for me in "service calls" ;-)

I have installed sarge with kernel 2.4.26 on it -- no problem.  Actually, 
everything works fine on it, with KDE and Kmail and Mozilla-Firefox as my 
choices (since that's what I'm using myself).  The problem is that with only 
a 166 MHz processor speed and the limited 96MB of RAM, the machine is 
agonizingly sloooooow!  (I'm spoiled by my own new 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM)  
For example, it takes about 4-1/2 minutes for cold boot up to the KDE 
desktop.  I almost fall asleep every time I wait for Kmail to come up, and 
the same for the address book.  Once Kmail is up and running, it's response 
is satisfactory.

I feel she needs to have a GUI interface for her email, etc. since that is 
what she is used to.  She is not very computer literate and I need to make it 
as easy as possible for her to operate (she's had some brain damage from an 
accident some years ago).

Anyone have any suggestions of what I could do to improve speed within the 
constraints I have mentioned?  (Yes, I know that command line email program 
would do wonders, but she needs the GUI.)  I don't really need all the fancy 
stuff that the KDE desktop provides.  I might mention that Win98se with 
Outlook Express is quite fast (relative to sarge/kde/kmail) on this same 
machine.

Thanks for any suggestion you might make...

Don