What's happening: Targus Armor Usb2.0 4 Port Hub, Ubuntu Mate Live vs Puppy Tahr and the verdict on my almost dead Acer laptop

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As I said in last post, after dithering for a while I got a USB hub. Got it from a local retailer here for 400/- rupees. So now I can do much more with the dying Acer laptop. The hub itself is minimal affair. What I hate about it are 2 things - 1. it's packing was real shitty affair - no clear lines saying where to cut to get the thing out 2. the hub has flat wire which leads to the USB port - I don't have much confidence in it. Lets see how far it goes.
Anyway now that I had the hub I could connect the external mouse, my portable HDD and my phone simultaniously I thought of trying to find a light distro which could let me use the 1GB RAM best. 
Enter Puppy Tahr - Puppy Linux is great little distro, and Puppy Tahr is based off Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS's packages, which means best of both worlds - Firefox and VLC. 
Thing is Firefox with couple of Google Docs tabs still kills my 1GB RAM, which in Live USB mode isn't backed by any SWAP memory. Unfortunately I don't have any option for SWAP memory - no harddisks available now for installation. I'm not able to find my old 320GB external HDD, it would have made ideal installation media for this laptop. Coming back to Puppy - everything is great, except for 2 things - 1. It could not mount my phone with MTP - didn't bother searching for any solution right now. 2. Firefox cannot handle Google Docs because of RAM limit and no SWAP available 'cause of Live USB. Except for these two points I loved Puppy. VLC worked fine, all the hardware was working fine - except maybe for display brightness. Anyway, bye bye Puppy.
Next I had also downloaded Ubuntu Mate Edition. And so prepped it's Live USB. With Mate issue 2 was present - again reason same - no SWAP. But it al least mounted my phone and let me copy things from it to the external HDD. So I decided to keep Mate as the Live USB OS on this dying Acer laptop. Yey!
Now the verdict on my Acer laptop is last. It's seen it's share of years. They have taken toll on it. The keyboard is missing a number of buttons. The touchpad is dead. One RAM slot is dead. The other holds a 1GB DDR2 SO-DIMM which is it's limit. The disk drive works but nothing boots from it. The HDD that came with this laptop died last month. It's original motherboard died three years back. The replacement board died last year, but is fixed now. It's battery has only 11% charge capacity left - but still enough to let you save your work and shutdown it safely without losing any work. It has only 2USB's which limit adding peripherals.
The things that work - headphone jack, display with very warm greypoint and stiff power button. So it's only good for watching movies, and doing very light office work and web browsing - again light. Open Google Mail/Docs and this thing is toast. But right now it works for me, which is why I decided to repair it and not trash it. So bit of compromise but I guess I'll have to make do. And frankly it's going fine except for Google Docs. But again when I drop in a HDD in this thing, it will be golden again.  

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