I use these setting on a laptop with a Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. It might seem like overkill to tweak this system. However since it is a work machine at any time I am running Lotus Notes, VirtualBox, OpenOffice, Chrome, etc. Should you have a system with limited resources I would recommend Xubuntu for a light full-featured DE. Another option and very light on resources would be any of the open|flux|blackbox window managers.