Reinstalling Arch. Need suggestions for older laptop.

Question

Hello!
Recently I revived my old HP Pavilion zv6000 by buying a $5 charger off of Amazon. It works quite well, surprisingly.
Specs:
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0 GHz CPU
- ATI Xpress 200M w/ 128 MB dedicated VRAM VGA
- 512 MB DDR RAM 333 MHz
- 80 GiB 4200 RPM HDD
Now, right when I got it I installed Arch. I used x86_64, JFS for / and XFCE as my DE. This combination didn't turn out very well. I would run out of usable RAM all the time and would start swapping like crazy, which would eventually lock up my computer and force me to hard reboot. During one of these reboots, I lost several files. Also, I would always have 100% CPU usage in any file operations. From un/archiving things, to just downloading big files, I would always hit 100% CPU usage, reducing my computer to an unusable state. I even tried the 2.6.38 (with the 200-line 'miracle' patch) kernel out of the testing repository, and while this did help with multi-tasking a little bit, my computer was still pretty unusable, sadly. I couldn't go on having it do this. I needed it to be in a semi-usable state.
Anyway, I installed the OEM Windows XP back on it (Ugh...) and it runs really good. Downloading files takes no CPU, and I have enough RAM to function pretty well with Firefox. Unfortunately, I prefer Linux much more then Windows, and I only installed Windows as a stop-gap solution until I figured out my re-installation game-plan. The problem is, I don't know what was wrong with my setup in the first place. I was thinking about falling back to i686 this time, and I will probably use LXDE as my DE instead of XFCE. This should cut down on the RAM usage. I was considering using JFS again, but I have lost my loyalty to it as of late because of the aforementioned problems.
So, I wanted to consult people smarter than I am on this issue. The Arch community seems very helpful. I would like to complement you guys on your fine wiki and distribution. Ever since I've used Arch (about a year ago), I have stuck with it. I am just having a difficult time getting this old-ish machine to run well. I am not expecting too awful much, all I really want to be able to do on it is browse the web with Firefox comfortably, maybe a bit of C/++ coding with Geany, edit some documents using OO.org and listen to music. Kinda like a netbook. An 8 pound netbook.
All recommendations are welcome. Thank you!

Answer 1

Thank you for your suggestions and quick reply Inxsible. I am surprised that you have that machine running well! That gives me some definite hope that I can get this machine running well.
Google Docs is interesting. I did not think of that. I'm not too big on 'cloud' computing, but I do suppose OO.o had gotten hefty lately. I will look into using alternatives to OO.o. Would Abiwod and Gnumeric be a good choice, or would they still be too heavy, do you think?
As far as the file manager goes, I could probably use the command line fairly well, although it's always nice to have a GUI file manager around for certain things. I'll look into XFE. I liked PCManFM the last time I tried it, and it seemed to be very light. I like the fact that it can manage my desktop too.
JFS seemed to perform poorly for me. I will likely follow your suggestion and use ext4.
I really like Firefox, and it'd be very difficult for me to not use it anymore. It's the one thing that I'd have a hard time giving up. This computer will be 90% web browsing, so Firefox is really important to me.
Leafpad looks solid, nice and lightweight. I like Geany as well, having used it a bit lately it seems very fast and lightweight, but has all the features I care about in a development environment.
I'm not too sure about my music player. I will certainly consider deadbeef. I didn't look at it too closely, though it looks really good from what I saw.
-Andrew