I also enjoy quite old laptop (HP2530p, 2009, 12", Core2 Duo 1.9GHz, sturdy, lightweight). I upgraded to 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. Plenty enough for the next couple of years, me thinks :) Perfectly runs W8.1/LinuxMint/Android-x86ICS
Completely irrelevant to the rest of the discussion at hand, but if you are going run Android as a Netbook OS on stock PC hardware with keyboard and mouse/trackpad, I've found that everything from Jellybean and up is incredibly much better to work with than Android 4.0.
They've done some deep level fixes which just makes everything flow and stick together as one "netbook" user-experience in a much better way.
My experience is mostly from Asus Tarnsformer type devices and not regular X86 laptop hardware, but I suspect the same improvements should be valid in X86 country. You certainly have nothing to lose by trying it [1].
Agree, and to wander further afield: how's your luck running apps? The Google apps work great, I use Opera and some hack to get Flash games to work, but the vast majority of apps just fail to load.
In spite of the problems, it's amazingly fast and usable, esp. compared to Windows/Ubuntu.
