It is an Amilo Pi1505 with a 533FSB T2050 Core Duo with 1GB and 5400 RPM 120GB HD running usually XP but sometimes Vista (dual boot). I clean it up and defrag it, but it is slow.

Yes it is full of crap, but it is much slower than my desktop which has a 4GHz overclocked dual core, 3GB and RAID 0, plus usefully for productivity, 1900x1200 24" screen.

Realistically how much faster are mid range new laptops compared with my one that I bought in Jan 2007? Are we getting twice the processing power and hard drive speeds?

 

I think your issue is more down to the slow HDD and not alot of RAM. XP is much happier with 2gigs and Vista even more so. Maybe upgrade the HDD to a 7200rpm/SATA drive as well if it will accept it? The cpu is fine, and XP/Vista should zip along.

 

T2050 shouldn't feel slow.

Unless your running some really resource hungry software in the background like Norton or McAfee etc. Not to mention the rest of teh junk (yahoo toolbar, messenger, google tool bar etc.). Running CCleaner on the registry every now and again does no harm either.

Anyway, 1gig is not enough for vista anymore since SP 1 came out. DDR2 SODIMMS are dirt cheap at the mo, so buying some more RAM is no big issue.