Definitely something with your machines. My 3 year old ThinkPad X120e with the miniscule AMD E350 processor runs fine with Windows 7. Even my old single core XB

Definitely something with your machines. My 3 year old ThinkPad X120e with the miniscule AMD E350 processor runs fine with Windows 7. Even my old single core XBMC machine with 2GB memory ran fine until I switched it to Linux (not for performance reasons, though)