And, sorry, had to laugh. When you mentioned
"older laptops", my mind
went back to my older laptop (the one just before this present i7
system). A 32-bit 2.8GHz Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM, without
any of these modern accelerated GPUs driving the video. KDE4 crawled
on it. And that was with a 7200RPM hard drive in it.
Actually off-topic:
A friend of mine just retired his laptop after twelve years. Half a
year ago I installed crunchbang because he no longer wanted to use XP
after support had ended. He never needed my help after installation, it
just worked and faster than before. Openbox is reasonable in its
resource usage, it works fine even on twelve year old laptops. He only
used the machine for browsing and writing, no audio work.
I'm surprised that the HD (30GB) survived all this time. I wiped it for
him, but I still have to check what the SMART data says.
Philipp