The windows XP era was quite long. I used it between 2001 and 2008. The laptop I mentioned, had more memory than the 32 bit version could technically allocate f

The windows XP era was quite long. I used it between 2001 and 2008. The laptop I mentioned, had more memory than the 32 bit version could technically allocate for a single process and most processes used far less than the maximum. So, I could run one big process like that and have all the usual stuff in the background without much issues. The 64 bit version was released later and of course allowed for more memory. They never really addressed the swapping issues. So it continued to make sense to upgrade the memory and switch off swapping as opposed to replacing the entire laptop because it was "slow". Most instance of people complaining about their laptop performance basically were running into this and never realized the fix was a 100$ upgrade of their memory + simple configuration change. A lot of those laptops are still fine for running Linux today.