Best way to speed up a laptop?

[Mitchell Gil Maltenfort]

My goal is to turn my laptop into an engineering worksation, so the
important benchmarks to me are integer and floating-point math.  

My specific hardware is a Toshiba 300 CDS, 266 MMX with 96 Meg RAM.  My
Linux install is a 2.0.36  kernel, Red Hat install.

My threshold for 'worth breaking a stable and working install' is a 20%
performance gain in relvant benchmarks.   

Can anyone advise me on whether this is possible?  

Thanks in advance.