Last April an old Centrino, Pentium M Thinkpad was given new life by installing 32 bit WattOS R8 LXDE edition (on a new 250 GB SSD, with RAM maxed out to 2 GB). It worked great, even after I switched sources to unstable Debian.

Today I tried out R9 Microwatt Live on a USB stick. Unfortunately, this Thinkpad doesn't have a Windows Key. So, after trying many combinations of keys without any luck, I eventually tried RTFM. (http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#configuring) This led me to realize a simple change to "Mod1" in ~/.i3/config would allow me to use the Alt key for Mod. Ah, but how to edit the config file when a terminal window won't open?

Ctrl-Alt-Fx  (where x < 7, but be careful with F5 because it can turn off WiFi) brings a console where vi can be used to edit ~/.i3/config.
Change:
set $mod Mod4
to
set $mod Mod1

ps -efl | grep i3
kill -9 the i3 process; causes it to restart. Login with guest, no password.

And now Alt can be used instead of (the missing) Windows Key. There may be better ways, but this worked for me.

If the i3 config wizard tried to run during Live start, I missed it, and it wouldn't run in a console display.

i3 was interesting to try, but I'll probably stick with LXDE (or XFCE).