My dad did mostly some word processing and web browsing on his favorite bunch of sites.
Processing power was less a problem in the end than the very limited memory (192 MB), even with the super-small-footprint Linux Distro.
You have to remember, 2008/2009 also was the time of the EEE-PCs, that weren't that much more powerful compute-wise, but already had at least 1GB of memory...