Your baseline load average is still over 1.0, that's not good.

Ah, you've got a 600 Mhz CPU? Ah, now it's all a bit more clear to me.
For a system like that, I would recommend that you dispense with the
heavyweight desktop environments (gnome or kde) and try a low carb
ubuntu distro which is optimized for less powerful hardware -

xubuntu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xubuntu

or

lubuntu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubuntu