As xbkingx is writing, it would seem like Windows version of Gimp has some serious performance issues. I'm mainly running Gimp in Debian on a laptop with 512 MB

As xbkingx is writing, it would seem like Windows version of Gimp has some serious performance issues. I'm mainly running Gimp in Debian on a laptop with 512 MB RAM, and the performance is pretty OK (as long as I don't go above 150dpi on A3 prints). Inkscape has also been crashing on me a lot in the past and was way too heavy, but since they released the 0.91 with the new Cairo-based renderer, it's been pretty fast and stable. I've personally had a harder time with Blender. I've found it particularly confusing that about half of the functionality seems to just not work when using the game engine. And when importing a video for editing, the length of the video and the audio may not match up.