Lucked into a laptop recently. Toshiba Satellite, bumped to 3GB. Came with a Vista license, so it's probably 4-ish years old. Dual core Turion, 1.9 GHZ I think.
I set it up with straight up Ubuntu 12.04.
And, it's pokey. Ex.: an rsync backup to the main desktop takes way longer, than even from my 1.6 GHz Atom powered netbook. (Identical script, identical set of folders it's syncing.).
I made a couple choices that i don't usually when I set this up. The /home partition I formatted ext4 instead of ext3, and I encrypted the my home directory.
I'm thinking either ext4 or the encryption is causing the performance hit.
Anyone know? Changing either pretty much requires I re-setup everything, which I can certainly do.