Need help from someone very techie. Help me run maple on my potato.

If you're willing to spend about $10-$15, you could upgrade the RAM on the laptop to 2GB. That should allow it to idle without causing any issues. You don't need much processing power for MS - the biggest issue is the huge amount of sprite preloading that it has to do. Your total lack of RAM forces it to eat into the hard drive's page file, which makes loading very slow, which makes MS think you've timed out.

Edit: Never mind, I am bad at reading and missed that you were boosting memory from a flash drive.