I have a laptop with similar specs that I use for Linux, and I have no real problems at all. I have a 1.6 GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 1 GB ram. The only major differe

I have a laptop with similar specs that I use for Linux, and I have no real problems at all. I have a 1.6 GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 1 GB ram. The only major difference (other than memory) is that I have 2 better hard drives, with the root directory on an 80 GB 7200 RPM drive, and a 100 GB 5400 RPM drive for music and backups. Moreover, I use cpufreq to scale my frequency down to 800 MHz during low usage. With all that said, I can kill and restore Firefox (with 20 plugins) with 16 tabs open (including a YouTube video) in about 10 seconds, at the same time that I am running Pidgin (IM client), 4 terminal sessions, compiling a kernel, and copying /dev/random to another machine over SSH (through fuse). In my opinion, that is quite acceptable, considering that such extreme usage is completely atypical. To call a dual-core, 1.6 GHz processor with 2 GB ram "pokey" seems to me to be a bit absurd. This coming from someone who's never owned a Mac and who would never buy an Air. (I tend to use my DVDRW drive a lot, and occasionally use Gigabit Ethernet.)