Porteus

I was wandering now that we have such a variety of choice of Desktop environment (DE) to choose from, which would be the fastest or crispiest of desktop for an old box? Your advices are really welcome (I have a pavilion hp laptop 1540ca).

Hi francois

I think it's depending on your taste which DE you use.

On my old Box (cpu=1ghz/ram=1gb) I'm really satisfied with XFCE,
because it's the best mix between speed and functionality.

imho LXDE would be faster

But I have noticed that every new version of firefox slows the System
down a little more.

try them all, and find out, what fits best for your needs

For less resource usage you should go with LXDE and a legacy version of firefox. If openbox becomes a reality then this would be the lightest version.

Razor-QT is light, it doesn't have as many features but it does the job.

Although an openbox configured crunchbang-style will be the speediest, while still being easy to use LXDE too

Your comments are appreciated. Thank you.

I have tried lxde, but this is an environment that I really do not know. In dual display, this seemed not to be the best option. So I went for xfce, and my old box is quite happy and to my surprise quite responsive.

The only drawback is when I have to build modules with ppm. It takes an eternity.