I'm visiting family in Ecuador.  A student's laptop is unusable with Win 
7, and I see that Win 7 requires 2x as much memory as he has.  Memory is 
probably really pricey here.

Ubuntu 12.10 says it requires 768 MB RAM.  What can run well with only 495 
MB RAM?  Does it have a good repository?

I remember Jason Hsu's Swift Linux -- I suppose that fits the bill.  What 
else?

Mike