I was given a Toshiba Satellite which has a P4 and 512 mem and a 40GB Drive. I installed Opensuse 11.3 and plan to donate it to a needly person, we has some needy kids who can not afford one, it runs very nice I was very surprised. Good to be able to breathe alittle more life into machine.
That’s a good thing to do for the kids. 
The memory is on the low side, so what desktop did you install?
Thats great 
I put the Gnome Desktop, I am going to try and find some old memory and try and get it to 1GB
The Laptop will be more then powerful to surf the web and write papers, Computers have gotten cheaper, but some people 300-500 dollars is still alot for them. I see no reason to throw a perfectly working computer in the landfill just because it is not the latest and greatest.
You may want to try Xfce or LXDE to make the laptop run even faster. I personally prefer Xfce but that’s my personal preference.
Best regards,
Greg
Further to what glistwan noted, you can find links to liveCDs for Xfce and LXDE here: Derivatives - openSUSE
There is also effort being made for another desktop in a openSUSE derivative called Petite Linux which uses the Enlightenment desktop. I like LXDE myself, but IMHO they are all very good.
Definitely try to get the RAM to over 1 GB. I have a system that is running 1.8 GHz (Pentium M) and originally 512 MB of Ram. It ran alright (Gnome) but I noticed the biggest benefit when I breached the 1 GB range, with Gnome and KDE (4.5 currently).
If somebody else is going to use it, I would think you would want the best supported desktop environment, but that’s just my opinion. There will be more documentation, tweaks and add-ons. Xfce is nice, but I keep going back to Gnome and I’m still trying to get myself more used to KDE.
The kiss of life!!;):)rotfl!